Screening
throughput; difficulties around the handling of large sample sizes; the need for a significant amount of equipment expertise; and the requirement for multiple third party software for data analysis. In recent years instrument manufacturers have sought to overcome these limitations and have developed a range of solutions that meet these challenges head on. Take IntelliCyt’s iQue Screener PLUS, for exam- ple, a high-throughput suspension cell and bead screening platform which the manufacturer claims is the fastest on the market. Not only does it offer increased speed and the capacity for cell and bead multiplexing, the system also enables reagent cost savings through the use of smaller sample volumes and a comprehensive analysis and visualisation software platform. These are valuable features when it comes to meeting the demands of high- throughput screening applications. “We’re seeing a growing number of pharma and biopharma customers using the iQue Screener PLUS to perform high throughput, high content assays,” says Joseph Zock, Senior Director of Product Management at IntelliCyt. “Our users are taking advantage of the ability to generate high content data in a physiologically-optimised way for critically important immune targets and func- tions across the entire early drug discovery pro- cess, from target identification through to sec- ondary screening.”
Integration of Miltenyi Biotec’s MACSQuant X Flow
Cytometer into liquid handling systems facilitates fully-
automated, high-throughput drug discovery applications
the instrument via a nozzle. This thin stream of cells is passed in front of one or more focused laser beams, with the resulting fluorescence emission and light scattering measured by detectors. As a large numbers of cells can be studied in a short period of time, flow cytometry is capable of gener- ating large volumes of statistically significant infor- mation very quickly3.
Overcoming high-throughput screening challenges
Those choosing to employ flow cytometry for HTS applications in drug discovery have traditionally encountered four key challenges when using con- ventional flow cytometry technologies: low
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High throughput is important, of course, but with analytical reproducibility another key priority in drug discovery, many customers are looking towards the reduced variability offered by fully- automated flow cytometry workflows. One manufacturer putting a significant focus on automation is Miltenyi Biotec. Its recently- launched MACSQuant X system is capable of automatically processing the 384-well plates used for HTS applications and is designed to deliver consistent results with uptake volumes as low as 5µL per sample. With the option to incorporate the process into liquid handling systems, the instru- ment offers the potential for a fully-automated workflow that minimises operator variability and is suitable for commercial scale environments, expanding the range of drug discovery applications that are possible.
Miltenyi Biotec has also developed a fully-auto- mated flow cytometric fluorescence resonance energy transfer (FRET) assay suitable for high- throughput investigation of protein-protein inter- actions4. The technique has been used as a stan- dardised method for monitoring drug effects. Using an annotated substance library, the automat-
Drug Discovery World Winter 2017/18
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