Objective

Industry academic partnerships have enabled more targeted and cost-effective drug discovery approaches.  With this high degree of collaboration, academic institutes throughout the world have gained access to compound libraries containing hundreds of thousands of compounds. Limited budgets and highly variable projects drive the need for cost effective and easy to use tools to facilitate efficient assay development and screening. Furthermore, these projects need to be run to industry standard and therefore automation of high throughput screens need to be reproducible in order to maintain the feasibility of this drug discovery processThis application note highlights the use of the TEMPEST®, a versatile microfluidic reagent dispenser designed to execute assay development and high-throughput screens in miniaturized assay volumes, driving down the cost of assay reagents by 60% while generating high-quality screening data.  At UCL, the Drug Discovery Group demonstrates that a hit confirmation run of 12,000 concentration response curves can be run with only 1.6 µL total reaction volumes when automated with the TEMPEST liquid handler resulting in a cost reduction of 26,000 GBP in detection reagent when compared to past liquid handling approaches.