High-throughput Screening - Increasing Lab Utilization of HTS

Increasing Lab Utilization of HTS

HTS is a relatively recent innovation, made lately feasible through modern advances in robotics and high-speed computer technology. It still takes a highly specialized and expensive screening lab to run an HTS operation, so in many cases a small-to-moderately sized research institution will use the services of an existing HTS facility rather than set up one for itself.

There is a trend in academia to be their own drug discovery enterprise. ( High-throughput screening goes to school) These facilities, which normally are only found in industry, are now increasingly be found as well at universities. UCLA for example, features an HTS laboratory (Molecular Screening Shared Resources (MSSR, UCLA) which can screen more than 100,000 compounds a day on a routine basis. The University of Illinois also has a facility for HTS, as does the University of Minnesota. The Rockefeller University, has an open access (infrastructure) HTS Resource Center HTSRC (The Rockefeller University, HTSRC) which offers a library of over 165,000 compounds. Northwestern University's High Throughput Analysis Laboratory supports target identification, validation, assay development, and compound screening.

In the United States, the National Institute of Health or NIH has created a nationwide consortium of small molecule screening centers that has been recently funded to produce innovative chemical tools for use in biological research. The Molecular Libraries Screening Center Network or MLSCN performs HTS on assays provided by the research community, against a large library of small molecules maintained in a central molecule repository.

For more information see Laboratory automation