Us Institution Adopts Scanning Cytometer for Hts Programme

The National Institutes of Health (NIH) Chemical Genomics Center (NCGC) has announced data showing the effectiveness of TTP LabTech's Acumen Explorer? for high content screening at high throughput. This exciting development was carried out as part of the NCGC's unique quantitative HTS (qHTS) programme. The NCGC is at the cutting edge of small molecule screening, running 50-70% of assays in a cellular format. The work involves extensive screening of the genome and data produced can be accessed by the entire research community via a public database so reliability of results is paramount. The NCGC's qHTS programme assays multiple concentrations of each compound and generates hundreds of thousands of concentration-effect relationships from primary screening. Consequently, there is a significant increase in wells screened over traditional single point testing, to a magnitude of 7- to 15-fold.
Integrated into NCGC's major screening system from Kalypsys, the Acumen explorer, a laser scanning cytometer is capable of generating 300,000 data points in 24 hours working in a 1536 well format. It will be used for population distribution analysis of cells in microplates, initially providing reporter gene analysis.
"This Acumen Explorer installation is the first in a US academic institution and we are thrilled that such a prestigious facility as the NCGC has chosen it for this high profile project," commented Dr Wayne Bowen, Chief Scientific Officer of Royston,
UK-based TTP Labtech. "The Explorer is already popular with major pharmaceutical companies and we anticipate that the emergence of data from this demanding high-throughput environment will accelerate the instrument's adoption in the European academic community."