High Throughput Screening (HTS) Core - Center for Innovative Drug Discovery

About the HTS Core Facility

The HTS Facility is a state-of-the-art technological hub that performs HTS of chemical and natural product libraries.

The core is located on the third floor of the Barshop Institute for Longevity and Aging Studies (about 2,500 sq. ft.) at the UTHSA Greehey Research Campus. It is fully equipped with cell culture facilities and a full suite of detection, robotic and imaging equipment designed to perform work in microwell plates (96- or 384-well formats).

The Facility has liquid handling systems (two Agilent Bravo and Perkin Elmer Janus pipetting stations; BioTek EL406, and the Labcyte Echo Acoustic Dispenser) that perform, with high precision, the steps necessary for automated screens of its chemical libraries.

HTS Intrumentation

People

Guiming Li, PhD

7 years at CIDD

- - Plate-based HTS
  - Imaging-based HTS

Srikanth Polusani, PhD

5 years at CIDD

- - Plate-based HTS
  - Imaging-based HTS

Lin Cao, MS

4 years at CIDD

- - Assists in various assays

Chemical Libraries

~171,000 cmpd sourced from ~3.0 million cmpd

Maybridge HitFinder (14,400)
Chembridge NovaCore (20,000)
Chembridge DiverSet (30,000)
Life Chemical Fsp3 (25,600)
Life Chemical Diversity Set (56,000)
UTSA Select (>2,500)
Covalent Inhibitors (3508)
Ion Channel Inhibitors (9000)
Now sourcing: Macrocyclic compounds (complex, unique chemical space, targeting protein-protein interfaces)
SIGMA LOPAC (1,280)
Prestwick FDA-Approved (1,200)
TargetMol Bioactives (4,400)

Initial screens using the latter libraries allow for repurposing of drugs with known clinical features for new therapeutics applications, enabling researchers to assign new IPs to these compounds. With a great deal of clinical data already available for these drugs, investigators can rapidly progress to preclinical animal models.

CIDD Vault

A powerful web-based database management and analysis system, the Collaborative Drug Discovery vault (CDD Vault), will track usage of chemical libraries and performs data analysis to identify lead candidates, including “on the fly” data analysis, enabling rapid identification of potential hits.

By using fluorescence-based readouts combined with the analysis of cell morphological properties, investigators can utilize the tools provided by the Harmony and Columbus software to perform powerful multiparametric studies of cell behavior upon treatment with chemical libraries or to analyze cell behavior in response to treatment with biological ligands or changes in growth conditions.

All small molecules are registered in the CDD vault, which provides tools to import screening datasets and analysis methods to query these data and perform diversity analyses of chemical libraries as well as searches by chemical substructure and/or chemical similarity and clustering algorithms. In addition, it provides investigators with standardized tools to view, analyze and then prioritize their screening data by expert chemists.