Medical research laboratories are complex facilities that contain some of the most advanced technologies in the world. Researchers take on hundreds of responsibilities in the lab, breaking down barriers to enable groundbreaking discoveries for medical advances. One of the newer technologies that has accelerated advancements in medical and scientific research is high-throughput screening.
What Is High-Throughput Screening?
High-throughput screening is a research method used for performing experiments in drug discovery, chemical, biochemical, and medical research applications. High-throughput screening offers researchers important automation tools that assist the research process. Robotics for liquid sample handling, software for data gathering and analysis, and detection systems enable researchers to test hundreds or even thousands of molecules at a time. Entire libraries of molecules can be screened for a desired chemical or biochemical activity at one time. The increased output of high-throughput screening drastically speeds up the process of identifying compounds for continued research.
High-throughput screening can efficiently identify compounds, genes, and antibodies that affect a particular biological or chemical pathway. After these compounds are identified, researchers can continue experimentation to optimize the compounds and determine whether they have the ability to act effectively on a target. As a result of these collective experiments, researchers can better understand the interactions necessary to begin a particular biochemical process—crucial for discovering candidates for newly designed drugs.
How Are High-Throughput Screening Facilities Used?
While advances in robotics, automation, computing, and other crucial technologies have markedly affected the speed and efficacy of high-throughput screening—the technology required for these capabilities is highly specialized. Many labs do not have the resources or the funds necessary to set up high-throughput screening operations on their own. However, specialized high-throughput screening facilities in commercial labs or academic research institutions can provide smaller labs with these critical services.
Screening facilities that have high-throughput screening capabilities keep large libraries of compounds on hand in the form of “stock plates” that can be used to make small copies known as “assays” for each experiment. In most cases, robotics and other automated handling machines are used to sample, add reagents, mix, and incubate thousands of molecules or compounds, then detect those that react as expected. Digital data readouts of hundreds of plates are generated and analyzed before return to the research facility for further experimentation.
High-Throughput Screening in the Future of Drug Discovery
The process of drug discovery necessitates the testing of hundreds, thousands, or even millions of molecules to identify those that may affect a biological target that can slow, alter, or halt a disease process. While high-throughput screening facilities currently allow highly accurate, supremely sensitive testing of nearly 1,600 samples in seconds—and hundreds of thousands per day—as technology continues to improve, so, too will drug discovery.
Quickly and accurately identifying multiple leads for new drugs can drastically speed the drug discovery process and reduce false leads in the process. Increased speed and smaller sample sizes minimize the cost of drug development. As technology continues to advance, new drugs will become available more quickly. In the future, high-throughput screening will continue to help make drugs and other therapies more accessible for the people who need them the most.
Sources:
https://www.bmglabtech.com/high-throughput-screening/
https://pharmacy.uiowa.edu/high-throughput-screening-facility