Wohl Institute for Drug Discovery

Vision

The HTS Unit will act as a nationally accessible central resource, open to all qualified Israeli researchers at universities, research institutes and biopharmaceutical companies, to provide screening in support of their needs to identify research tools to support biomedical discovery and therapeutic and prophylactic molecules.

Mission

The HTS Unit will be capable of screening cellular and/or biochemical assays at rates up to 100,0000 chemical entities per screening campaign. It will have compound management capabilities, i.e. an automated plate replication system and “hit” picking, stand alone liquid handling workstations for nanoliter to microliter dispensing for use in offline assay development, hit validation and lead optimization and software for integrating and managing compound, screening, chemoinformatics, data visualization and project data. The Unit will have the ability to perform High Content Screening (HCS) against an entire library or subsets, including siRNA screens against phenotypic assays (future). Additional materials will include up to 100,000 diverse compounds, bioactives and known drugs to enable Systems Pharmacology.  The facility is organized so as to reconcile the requirement for rigorous control of procedures and data analysis with the diversity of the needs expressed by the Weizmann scientific community, researchers from other academic organizations, hospitals as well pharmaceutical companies. These needs range from high-throughput screening of chemical compounds on complex cellular readouts, to functional testing of a limited subset of bioactive molecules, known drugs, siRNA or shRNAs or combinations in a defined model, to medicinal chemistry on an existing compound associated with the need to develop an appropriate bioassay.

Functional Operations Management and Data Analysis

Operational components will include all aspects of HTS data processing, starting from capturing the chemical structures (or genes, in the future) of the screening libraries, inventorying and tracking the associated physical samples and plates, processing the raw data and associating the structures with the calculated screening endpoints. They will also integrate informatics with the HTS instrumentation. Key software will include a chemical compound registration system (chemical structure database), a plate and sample tracking system (plate logistics), and a system to track and process all assay information and the associated screening data. All data will be stored in a database for robustness and scalability.  Data analysis and discovery informatics systems will include reporting components, statistics, and chemoinformatics tools to assure data quality and screening efficiency, and to analyze the screening end points in the context of chemical structures or genes. The assay data management component will manage all data related to the assays including assay description and metadata, all variables, and calculation instructions. The assay data management system will also be closely integrated with statistics and visualization software to monitor stability and data quality over a screening run and facilitate interactive post-processing of the results by the screening scientist. Screening end points will be aggregated by chemical structure, assay metadata and aggregation rules into a data warehouse where they can be readily queried and analyzed by the user community in the organization, including external users.

Entry Points for Collaborators