About the High Throughput Screening Laboratory
The lab is a fee-for-service facility of University of Kansas, Lawrence and KU Medical Center that provides researchers with the ability to run high-throughput chemical, siRNA, and high-content imaging screens. The center incorporates compound libraries, instrumentation, databases and personnel. We develop assays and execute screens encompassing cancer, infectious diseases, inflammation, neurological disorders, bioprospection, and bioremediation research fields.
High throughput screening of large chemical libraries of compounds is a proven way to identify novel chemical entities that target a biological system of interest. To have this technology available to biomedical researchers in Kansas and beyond, the KU High Throughput Screening Laboratory was established in 2002 with support from the COBRE Center for Cancer Experimental Therapeutics, the State of Kansas and the University.
The lab is a self-sustaining service laboratory that works in three distinct ways:
- As a self-sustaining fee-for-service facility, HTS provides internal and external academia and nonprofit institutions, as well as the biotech and pharmaceutical industry, with exceptional quality services at the lowest cost structure. We partner with the investigators collaboratively to expedite their probe and drug discovery needs pertaining to target identification and validation, assay development, high throughput screening, hit confirmation, data mining and medicinal chemistry to facilitate hit to lead development. The HTS lab harbors a collection of over 398,000 small-molecule libraries and is equipped with cutting-edge technology that increases throughput and precision of screening operations.
- As Infectious Diseases Assay Development Laboratory that is supported in part by the NIH CoBRE in Chemical Biology for Infectious Disease (CBID) grant (NIH P20GM113117), we help to generate preliminary data for submission of competitive grant applications and help expand the scope of research for junior investigators, develop new technologies, and/or achieve other goals as defined by the principal investigator that will better position the institution to conduct biomedical research. The CBID program provides select investigators with complete financial support for research activities, mentoring, and access to two additional core lab services: the Computational Chemical Biology Core and the Synthetic Chemical Biology Core.
- As a shared resource for the KUMC Comprehensive Cancer Center, the HTS lab is partly supported by the University of Kansas Medical Center NCI Cancer Center Support grant (P30 CA16852407). The HTS lab provides assay development and screening (drug repurposing, diversity and combination screens) support for cancer focused projects as a part of the KU Cancer Center's Drug Discovery, Delivery & Experimental Therapeutics (D3ET) Research Program, which provides an infrastructure built with a pharma perspective in accelerating drug discovery efforts. Further development of hit compounds from the screen is supported by the Cancer Center Medicinal Chemistry core (MDCM, Director Dr. Stefan Bossmann) and by Biopharmaceutical Innovation and Optimization Center core (BIOC, Director Dr. Michael Hagemen).