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Microfluidics

Analog-to-digital drug screening

Nature volume 483, pages 43–44 (2012)Cite this article

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Current methods for screening libraries of compounds for biological activity are rather cumbersome, slow and imprecise. A method that breaks up a continuous flow of a compound's solution into droplets offers radical improvements.

Finding new leads for drug discovery increasingly depends on high-throughput methods that allow efficient biological screening of chemical libraries. Reporting in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Miller et al.1 describe a method for screening large numbers of compounds —thousands or more — for their activity as enzyme inhibitors. This protocol generates immense amounts of high-precision dose–response data in ultrashort times of just a few minutes per compound. The authors' approach could vastly improve the efficiency of current screening processes, which represent a major bottleneck for drug-discovery programmes.

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Figure 1: High-resolution dose–response screening.

References

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Affiliations

  1. Department of Chemistry and Applied Biosciences, Robert C. R. Wootton and Andrew J. deMello are at the Institute of Chemical and Bioengineering, Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich, CH-8093 Zurich, Switzerland.

    Robert C. R. Wootton & Andrew J. deMello

Authors
  1. Robert C. R. Wootton
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  2. Andrew J. deMello
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Corresponding authors

Correspondence to Robert C. R. Wootton or Andrew J. deMello.

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Wootton, R., deMello, A. Analog-to-digital drug screening. Nature 483, 43–44 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1038/483043a

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