Cell-based assays for high-throughput screening.

The fifth international World Pharmaceutical Congress was organised by the Cambridge Healthtech Institute and contained six concurrent conferences in parallel. This report focuses on the third annual conference: 'Cell-based assays for HTS'. The major topics of this meeting were technologies for setting up screening assays, cells as biological reagents for screening campaigns, three-dimensional cell culture and the use of stem cells for drug screening. Technology-based presentations focused on the latest developments for cell-based screening, such as the open microscopy environment, a cell culture array as a kind of 'cell culture on a chip', a cellular microarray for analysing the binding behaviour of cells and aptamer technology. Further talks described success stories using the β-galactosidase enzyme fragment complementation assays from Applied Biosystems (InteraX) and from DiscoveRx for the drug discovery process. Other presentations focused on the Cell Sensor Technology from Invitrogen and a dual luciferase-based technology for G-protein-coupled receptors from Promega. One talk presented a comparison of fluorometric laser imaging plate reader system and ion works devices for ion channel-based assays, as well as the challenges facing high-throughput screening (HTS) of ligand gated ion channels. Two lectures highlighted the growing role of three-dimensional cell culture and the potential use for drug discovery. A key point of interest was also the role of cells as a reagent in an HTS environment and the attempts made by different companies to overcome issues for cell-based screening campaigns. In this context, several talks focused on the use of frozen and/or division-arrested cells for drug discovery processes. An interesting topic, the use of stem cells in the drug discovery process, was covered by two presentations.