Abstract

Development of High-content Assays for Compound Screening and Hit Validation

Kamyar Hadian, Group Leader, Helmholtz Zentrum München

Phenotypic screening has highly emerged in the past years. Especially High-Content Screening (HCS) has gained strong acceptance in the field of target validation and compounds screening as a method to follow more innovative and sophisticated assays. In line with this, the academic environment has the great power to provide a rich set of novel biological targets that now can be addressed with high-content imaging. We have established the infrastructure to analyze HCS assays in a sterile environment over several days. This process can be done for bigger compound screening campaigns as our liquid handling system integrates a HCS device. We are running HCS projects in different target areas with various given complexities. However, we are now focusing on running stem cell- and microtissue-based assays for compound screening activities. In particular, we use stem cell assays to analyze the influence of small molecules on differentiation and pluripotency.