High-Content Screening: Parallel Analysis Fuels Accelerated Discovery and Development

Thought Leaders Interviewed for This Report:

Barry R. Bochner, Biolog; Susan Catalano, Rigel; David Chao, Akceli; Michael Famulok, the University of Bonn; Yan Feng, Institute of Chemistry and Cell Biology, Harvard Medical School; Christoph Hergersberg, Xantos Biomedicine; Edward Hunter, Q3DM; Mehran M. Khodadoust and Thomas P. Klein, Bionaut Pharmaceuticals; Stephen Oldfield, Molecular Devices; Eric T. Rhodes, Sangamo BioSciences; Katherine Tynan, Virtual Arrays; Mark Velleca, Cellular Genomics Inc. (CGI)

This Report Evaluates the Use of New Cell-Based Assays in Vital Areas of Drug Development: Target identification and validation. Lead compound selection and optimization. Obtaining high-quality information about drug targets and potential drug candidates. Toxicity screening. Identifying leads that might be useful for treating complex diseases. Testing for interaction of a compound with orphan receptors or other targets with unknown functions.

Overview

Pharmaceutical companies face significant challenges in transforming the promise of the genomics revolution into a pipeline of safe and effective new drugs. Overcoming these challenges will require pharmaceutical companies to make a number of changes to the traditional drug discovery process. Given the high cost of failure in drug development, it is crucial that researchers have tools that provide high-quality information about drug targets. High-Content Screening: Parallel Analysis Fuels Accelerated Discovery and Development examines the potential benefits of new and emerging high-content-screening assays as critical tools in the drug discovery and preclinical drug development process.

High-content-screening assays offer the potential to address many of the bottlenecks currently encountered in drug discovery. Because these assays provide researchers with large amounts of biological and chemical information, they offer important enhancements to information obtained through traditional affinity-based screens. Importantly, insights from these information-rich assays could help researchers discover the most effective drugs more efficiently, while getting flawed compounds to "fail fast," thus saving considerable time and expense. These assays can be used across nearly all stages of the drug discovery and development process, including target identification and validation, lead selection and optimization, and preclinical studies.

This report evaluates the efforts of several companies that are working on technologies to improve information obtained from cellular assays and other high-content studies. Several companies have developed cell-based assays that can be used to identify genes or cellular pathways involved in disease processes, to determine the functions of target genes, or to measure phenotypic changes that may be induced upon activation of certain genes. The report concludes with a business and strategic outlook as well as extensive commentaries from leading experts in the high-content-screening field.