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<p><b>High Throughput Screening - a Strategy for Drug Discovery</b></p> |
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<p>The year 2000 has been a landmark year for science and medicine, and will leave |
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an indelible mark on the process of drug discovery, as well. The drugs developed |
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over the last four decades have been aimed at about 500 different biological |
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targets. With the sequencing of the human genome, over 100,000 new biological |
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targets will be recognized. It has been estimated that at least 10 % of these |
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could be potential targets for drugs. This means additional problems for the |
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already "thinly-spread" drug industry.</p> |
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<p>High throughput screening (HTS) is a system for analyzing compound libraries |
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and natural products in order to identify new therapeutic hits and leads on |
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potential targets. HTS arose in the 1990s as 96 well microtitre plates were |
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selected over test tubes as the receptacle of choice for biological assays. |
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In combination with combinatorial chemistry, it resulted in a paradigm shift |
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from knowledge-based sequential synthesis and testing to parallel processing |
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of multiple compounds. With the objective to improve success rates and cycle |
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times for discovering new hits, HTS is set to become one of the cornerstones |
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of drug discovery.</p> |
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<p>No matter what technologies are implemented in the HTS process, the goal is |
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two-fold: to increase the company's drug-screening capacity and to reduce the |
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consumption of costly reagents.</p> |
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<p align="center"><img src="p/Finernd_ljudi_9.jpg" width="300" height="380" border=1></p> |
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