Assay development throughput screening

Keywords Assay development, Automation, Data management, High throughput screening, Statistics... 

The development of maraviroc (21), much like other chemokine receptor antagonists, started with a high-throughput screen employing a competition binding assay and led to the hit compound UK-107,543. Chemical optimization of this compound led to the development candidate UK-427,857 during this optimization phase, a parallel characterization of the compounds was performed... 

Birkert O., Gauglitz G., Development of an assay for label-free high-throughput screening of thrombin inhibitors by use of reflectometric interference spectroscopy, AnalBioanal Chem 2002 372 141-147. 

However, many recent instruments are still not considered satisfactory, since professional developers in the field of high-throughput screening (HTS) want to use the full performance of the latest generation of robots and computers for automation. This results in new instrumental developments, like the possibility of reading not only 96, but 384 or even 1536 wells plates as well as DNA chips, very rapidly (in a minute or so) and repeatedly without any mechanical failures. Hence, in the eyes of company scientists developing new assays, many present-day instruments still correspond to an intermediate stage of development. For research laboratory scientists, on the other hand, the actual equipment offers excellent performance. 

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