High Throughput Screening

The HiTS/IPCdd facility brings together a set of skills and technologies to accelerate the discovery of bioactive molecules either using experimental (in vitro or cellular) screening or molecular modelling for drug design approches. 
More precisely, the objectives of the facility is to support the identification, understanding, validation, and screening of key signaling pathways of tumor development (e.g., enzymes, protein/protein interaction surfaces).

HiTS/IPCdd is open to scientific communities of both the academic and private sectors. 
In order to access the facility, the potential users must submit a research project to the facility scientific and technical managers to describe the nature of the experiments to be carried out, as well as any provisional specifications including an estimate of the assistance needed from the local staff. 
Criteria for project selection are: feasibility, scientific and schedule adequacy with the facility, work plan for the experiments to be conducted. 
The evaluation also takes into account the strategic priorities of the research laboratory hosting the facility. After approval, the subsequent procedure include the following: 

• different specifications to co-publication to agree on whether the request is internal or external, 
• the release of an invoice in the situation of an external request (under a short and defined duration), 
• the set up of service provision contracts in the case of integrated studies including a develpment phase and which in total last more than three months.

All-in-all, HiTS/IPCdd provides all the necessary tools to overcome the challenges of early drug discovery stages in oncology. In particular, the services provided by the facility rely on the following equipment and methods: 

• a very small volume acoustic dispenser (echo550), 
• an in-line automated centrifuge, -an automated plate sealer, 
• a multimodal plate reader (e.g., fluorescence, absorbance, luminescence). 

The facility also hosts a versatile dispensing robot for larger volumes manipulation. 

This series of equipment allows performing fast and robust screening campaigns up to thousands of compounds in 1536 well plates. Moreover, HiTS/IPCdd integrates in a single entity the facility expertise and the cheminformatics and molecular modelling know-how of the staff member Philippe Roche. 

The local staff members notably provide a large variety of custom services from chemical library management to post-screening analysis, with a particular focus on subset generations so that the projects are efficiently driven to SAR by catalog. 

Thanks to their expertise, the staff members are also able to carry the hit out to lead phases once the hits are validated.