Business


A roadmap for achieving self-sustainability of academic high throughput screening core facilities


Many academic HTS centres, faced with the high costs of drug discovery and decreasing federal funding, are struggling to survive. Just as with any small business, a sound business plan is critical for achieving and maintaining self sustainability.


H


igh throughput screening for hit identifi- cation has now taken a strong foot-hold in academia. The academic high throughput screening (HTS) core facility caters, depending on the institutional mandate, to the drug discovery needs of its clients. The academic HTS laboratory is not just a fee-for-service facility, but a strong, critical, collaborative partner in ele- vating academic drug discovery research efforts to unheralded heights. However, the HTS staff is nei- ther tenured faculty, nor fully supported by a defined budget or cost centre. The self-sustainabil- ity of an academic High Throughput Screening Laboratory is in part dependent on its state-of the art infrastructure, ability to meet the needs of incoming projects, tiered rate structure, and insti- tutional support. As such, self-sustainability is kinetic in nature, and maintaining a steady stream of projects is essential to the fiscal health and the business plan of a screening core. Based on our experience at the University of Kansas, we present a roadmap for successfully transitioning academic high throughput screening laboratories to become self-sustainable in a short period. The academic screening centres are better served, in the long run,


Drug Discovery World Winter 2011/12


by merging forces with each other to endure the current, difficult environment of reduced federal funding and competition. Regional consortia would fill this need, allowing sharing of compound libraries and the other gap-filling screening resources between academic screening labs in areas where institutional support for core HTS functions is sparse. By fostering collaborative partnerships between the institutional faculty and other core facilities on university campus, the academic screening centres are in a unique position to strengthen and transform screening projects to bona fide and robust drug discovery projects. In recent years, drug discovery has gained a new home in academia. Though smaller in scale than in pharma, academic and non-profit drug discovery operations have taken root by way of new high throughput screening (HTS) laborato- ries and increasing resources in academic medici- nal chemistry. HTS laboratories enable screening of large compound libraries against target of choice using validated biochemical, biophysical or cell-based assays. A number of recently FDA- approved drugs originated from HTS campaigns, validating HTS as a reliable starting point for


By Dr Peter R. McDonald, Dr Anuradha Roy and Dr Rathnam Chaguturu


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