The Assay Development and Drug Discovery Core provides in-house expertise coupled with state-of-the-art equipment to help academic and industry scientists establish new assays or adapt and refine existing ones for high-throughput screening, enabling target identification and drug discovery.
The core’s expertise applies to all life science disciplines to accelerate research into target and drug discovery phases, identify novel targets within pathways, and drive findings into clinical trials and ultimately therapies for disease.
Our team looks forward to supporting your next project.
Capabilities
Design
From the onset of a project, we take a flexible and collaborative approach. We will work with you directly to develop assays for your project or train you to develop, miniaturize, and optimize assays to be highly reproducible for medium (96-well) to high (384-well) throughput formats.
Build
Our team will assist in the iterative process required to test and optimize assay conditions, and can perform assays for you to save you time. Alternatively, we can train you to independently use plate readers for biochemical assays and use automated high-throughput microscopes for cell-based assays.
Automate
The core offers assistance and troubleshooting to automate screening assays that have been tested and validated on a small scale. We use robotic liquid handling systems to automate high-throughput assays and offer a fully bio-annotated library of compounds for screening.
Analyze and Inform
After automation, the core will run a small screen of compounds to validate the newly developed assay. After developing, optimizing, running and validating assays in-house, you can transfer these assays to high-throughput screening facilities (such as the Small Molecule Discovery Center at UC San Francisco) to perform additional screening with larger structurally diverse compound libraries.
Core Equipment
Cellomics Arrayscan XTI
Meso Scale Discovery QuickPlex SQ120
Agilent BRAVO Benchcel system with PlateLoc Thermal Microplate Sealer
BioTek EL406 with plate stacker
EL-406 Liquid Handler
Sector Imager
BioTek Synergy H4
Molecular Devices ImageXpress Confocal HT.ai High-Content Imaging System
BioTek MultiFlo FX in Biosafety cabinet
Thermo Scientific CellInsight CX7 Microscope
