Find new drugs with high throughput screening and computational expertise
Are you interested in finding new drugs to cure cancer or solve the antibiotic crisis? Well, the Small Molecule Screening Facility (SMSF) can’t promise such broad success, but we can help you search through millions of compounds to find a few lead compounds that can be useful for nearly any research question you can ask.
SMSF has expertise in high throughput screening, in computational modeling and docking for screening in silico, and in pharmacologically-informed sourcing of compounds for you from the millions of commercially available compounds. We also coordinate with the Medicinal Chemistry Center for synthesis of small molecules that can’t be purchased through your favorite vendor.
For example, Tim Bugni and colleagues in Pharmacy recently worked with SMSF to screen a library of marine natural products for anti-cancer activity, starting with field-collected microbial samples and ending with filtered and fractionated growth medium of secondary metabolites used to screen cell cultures for anti-TGFb activity (an assay developed in-house, too!). All told, five lead compounds, biemamides A-E, were identified and their activity verified in an in vivo C. elegans assay. This publication is just one example of how SMSF staff can work with researchers to develop small molecule screening solutions to any number of biological questions.
If your research could benefit from some new chemical tools, then contact SMSF today!