The High Throughput Screening (HTS) Facility at the University of Maryland School of Pharmacy provides researchers with access to state-of-the-art instrumention and knowledgeable faculty and staff who can assist with assay development.
Compound Library:
Researchers working with the HTS Facility have access to a selection of diverse compound libraries, including:
- FDA Drug Collection: A collection of 1,280 FDA approved drugs.
- Selleck Bioactive Collection: A collection of 2,500 structurally diverse, medicinally active, and cell permeable small molecules whose bioactivity and safety have been confirmed through clinical trials.
- NATx Diversity Collection: A collection of 5,000 semi-synthetic compounds based on natural product scaffolds.
- Chembridge Collection: A collection of 55,000 small molecules whose compounds were selected for novelty, diversity, druglike properties, and chemical structure analyses.
Research Services:
The primary service offered by the HTS Facility is assay design and validation. The facility supports a range of detection modalities for assay measurements including: absorbance, fluorescence, time-resolved fluorescence, fluorescence polarization, fluorescence resonance energy transfer (FRET), time-resolved FRET, and luminescence.
Cell-free and cell-based and assays include: recombinant proteins, cellular isolates, cell lysates, cell lines, and whole model organisms (e.g., C. elegans and yeast). The goal is to help investigators develop HTS-compatible assays, obtain preliminary data, and to screen our in house compound collections to identify hits.
Assay targets include:
- Heme oxygenase inhibitors
- Nuclear receptors
- Transcriptional factors
- Antimicrobial targets
- Colorectal cancer targets
- Breast cancer targets
- Lung cancer targets
Fees for available services are provided below.
| Biomek FXp-514 | UMB | Non-Profit | For-Profit |
|---|---|---|---|
| Per Sample Plate* (Submitted Samples) | $100/plate | $125/plate | $150/plate |
| Assay Development | $150/plate | $180/plate | $225/plate |
| Biomek FXp-630 | UMB | Non-Profit | For-Profit |
| Per Sample Plate (Submitted Samples) | $120/plate | $140/plate | $180/plate |
| Assay Development | $180/plate | $220/plate | $270/plate |
* Plate 96- or 384-well
Additional Resources:
Researchers who collaborate with the HTS Facility can also take advantage of other resources housed within the School of Pharmacy, including:
- Hit-to-Lead Optimization by Medicinal Chemistry: The HTS Facility seeks collaborations for the development of HTS hits into biological tools or drug candidates using our expertise in drug design and organic/medicinal chemistry. Researchers in the facility can synthesize direct analogs of HTS hits to study structure-activity relationships (SAR). In addition, they can design novel chemical scaffolds using computer-aided drug design and structure-based drug design methods for drug development purposes.
- Nuclear Magnetic Resonance (NMR) Facility: The NMR Facility provides instruments and services to assist researchers with a full range of NMR studies. Faculty provide comprehensive support for researchers in the areas of structure-based drug design, including structure characterization; protein dynamics; and fragment-based drug design.
- Mass Spectrometry Center: The Mass Spectrometry Center provides state-of-the-art expertise, methodology, and instrumentation to the School of Pharmacy and surrounding research community. The facility also provides researchers the opportunity to perform and access sophisticated experiments by working closely in a true collaborative effort between faculty, students, and staff.
- Computer-Aided Drug Design (CADD) Center: To facilitate the discovery of novel therapeutic agents, rational drug design methods in combination with structural biology offer great potential. The major goal of the CADD Center is to initiate these collaborations, leading to the establishment of research projects to discover novel chemical entities with the potential to be developed into novel therapeutic agents.