Drug Discovery Core

The core supports a wide range of phenotypic and target-based assays. Phenotypic assays range from 2D to 3D, widefield to confocal, and antibody to dye-based. It collaborates with users to develop customized assays and analytical pipelines tailored to their specific needs. Current specializations include neurite tracing, lipid droplet quantification, cell viability, morphological and kinetic analyses, phagocytosis, cell marker detection, cell adhesion, among others.

Additionally, the core is implementing Cell Painting technology for phenotypic screening. Cell Painting is a cutting-edge, unbiased screening technology applicable to cell-based assays without prior knowledge of disease phenotype. This technique uses a suite of fluorescent dyes to stain cellular organelles for phenotypic profiling in 96- and 384-well plates. The Phenix platform captures images of the painted cells, followed by automated image analysis to extract over 2000 morphological features (such as size, shape, texture, and intensity) from each cell. Feature selection is then conducted to identify attributes that distinguish cells under various conditions (e.g., diseased vs. healthy cells). These identified features can be used to screen libraries of small molecule compounds, identifying those that revert the disease phenotype to a healthy state. This platform offers a truly unbiased, high-throughput, and massively parallel discovery system, accelerating drug discovery even before the biological mechanisms of a disease are fully understood.

​

Visit the core's website to learn more about available services.