Assays
TRACKING HTS ASSAY DEVELOPMENT TIME opportunity for improving drug discovery
High throughput screening assays are developed more quickly now due to advances in technology, improved liquid handling and sensitive detection, as well as increased communication between scientists in high throughput labs and therapeutic areas. Increased availability of commercial reagents, target proteins and engineered cell lines will relieve current bottlenecks for further improvement.
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f time is money, then real progress has been made in high throughput screening (HTS) technology in the past two years – HTS assays are being developed more quickly. According to the recent report High Throughput Screening 2010: Effective Strategies, Innovative Technologies, and Use of Better Assays based on interviews with 52 HTS directors at pharmaceutical companies and government-sponsored institutes and published by HighTech Business Decisions, the time it takes to develop HTS assays is now less than six months on average. Several factors contribute to this improve- ment: experience on the part of the scientists with technology and targets, new technology such as two-antibody assays, sensitive detection and accu- rate liquid handling, and commercially available reagents including antibodies, assay kits and a broader selection of fluorophores.
Faster assay development
The directors of high throughput screening labs report that assay development time has improved; HTS assays now take an average of 5.1 months to develop. The range of times is large, varying between one and 18 months; however, most of the directors (84%) interviewed for the study report assay devel- opment time of six months or less. The distribution of assay development time is shown in Figure 1.
Drug Discovery World Summer 2010
Assay development time has generally decreased in the past two years. Only 10% of the directors say their assay development time has increased. The remaining directors say assay development time has decreased (52%) or stayed the same (38%) in the past two years. This change in assay development time is shown in Figure 2. HTS directors mention several reasons that have contributed to this decrease, including:
By Dr Jennifer Hartigan, Cindy Liu and William Downey
Figure 1: Distribution of assay development time in months
10 12
0 2 4 6 8
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 12 Assay Development Time in Months
© HighTech Business Decisions 14 18
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