By Allison Proffitt
October 7, 2009 | The Broad Institute is using Genedata Screener for small-molecule screening, crucial to the Institute’s contribution to the Molecular Libraries and Imaging Initiative funded by the National Institute of Health (NIH).
“We’re using it for high throughput screening. This is a complicated project that involves complex biology, lots of robotics and hundreds of thousands of compounds, there are a lot of points of failure in these experiments,” Dave DeCaprio, associate director of the Chemical Biology Platform at the Broad Institute, told Bio-IT World.
“What we found in Genedata is that it was built for high throughput screening. It really maps exactly to the problem we’re trying to solve.”
Broad chose the Genedata Assay Analyzer and Condoseo modules and finalized the purchase in “April or May,” DeCaprio says. “It took us four to six weeks to get it up and running in our processes, so we’ve already used it in seven or eight million screening wells.”
Providing analysis from a single plate to an entire screening campaign, Assay Analyzer captures data from diverse plate readers and processes them based on predefined business rules. Condoseo fits thousands of dose-response curves within minutes for efficient IC50 determination in validation and assay panel screens. According to DeCaprio, screening campaigns that once took several weeks to execute can now be done in days.
DeCaprio says that the Genedata tool had two major advantages. The software includes algorithms to automatically flag common problems and it also has a manual mode that lets researchers “interactively explore and QC the data.”
DeCaprio and his team are using the tool in the NIH’s Molecular Libraries and Imaging Initiative, a program for medical research comprised of nine institutions that conducts high-throughput biological studies of diverse small molecules to advance new drug discoveries.
It’s a project DeCaprio is excited about. The initiative “is really interesting because it allows anybody, if they have interesting biology, they give it to us and NIH pays,” he explains. “[Researchers] give us an assay and we run it through a library of 325,000 compounds to find hits, and if we find hits we’ll do optimization and follow-up to get useful information.”
DeCaprio says that the Institute is looking at two more of Genedata’s modules—the hit profiler and the image analyzer—for future projects.