Mel Reichman on Pool Shark’s Cues for More Efficient Drug Discovery

The Drexel Department of Chemistry Seminar Series presents "Pool Shark’s Cues for More Efficient Drug Discovery" on Thursday, November 12, 2009 at 4:30 p.m. in Disque Hall room 109 (32nd Street between Market and Chestnut Streets). Mel Reichman, senior investigator and director of the LIMR Chemical Genomics Center, the Lankenau Institute for Medical Research, is the guest speaker.

Modern drug discovery by high-throughput screening (HTS) begins with testing hundreds of thousands of compounds in biological assays. The confirmed hit rate for typical HTS is less than 0.5%; therefore, 99.5% of the costs of HTS are for generating null data. Orthogonal convolution of compound libraries (OCL) is 500% more efficient than present HTS practice. The OCL method combines 10 compounds per well. An advantage of this method is that each compound is represented twice in two separately arrayed pools. We will discuss results and the potential for the approach to better enable academic centers of excellence to validate medicinally relevant biological targets.