1.7 Tech Feat Drug Disc MH

high-throughput screening (HTS) has revolutionized the process of drug discovery. Automation and miniaturization have allowed biotech companies to screen hundreds of thousands of compounds against disease targets, in the hope of identifying the precious few that can be developed into commercial, patentable medicines. To use a fashionable analogy, it’s like speed dating for medicines. But this approach of simply testing more and more compounds at faster and faster rates is not as productive as the industry had hoped. Because the earliest stages of the discovery process are relatively unselective, the vast majority of early hits fail to progress, either because of the attrition caused by medical or chemical failings discovered only in the later stages of development, or because the flow of potential leads is still too overwhelming. Drug-discovery researchers, and the companies that supply their technological needs, are now concentrating on improving both the quality of the compounds entering the first screening and the value of the assays being done. Rather than bigger and faster, the focus is on doing things earlier and smarter. The demand for high-throughput screening began in the early 1990s, when drug companies began testing the landslide of compounds created by combinatorial chemistry against an increasing number of disease targets identified by genomic research.“What we then realized was that the bottleneck, rather than being in the set-up and running of the assay, moved to reading the assays themselves,” says John Anson,