MONROVIA, CA – Dr. Can “Jon†Ozbal, Vice President and General Manager of Rapid Fire Products at BioTrove will be giving a presentation at GTCbio’s 3rd Assay Development & Screening Technologies Conference, June 5-6, 2008 in San Francisco, CA. Dr. Ozbal will be speaking on label-free HTS of intractable targets with rapid-fire mass spectrometry.
Small molecule high-throughput screening in drug discovery today is dominated by techniques which are dependent upon artificial labels or reporter systems. While effective, these approaches can be affected by certain experimental limitations, such as conformational restrictions imposed by the selected label or compound fluorescence/quenching. Label-free approaches potentially address many of these issues by allowing researchers to investigate more native systems without fluorescence- or luminescence-based readouts. However, due to throughput and expense constraints, label-free methods have been largely relegated to a supporting role as the basis of secondary assays. In this talk a novel mass spectrometry-based approach using the RapidFire high-throughput mass spectrometry system will be described and examples provided. Mass spectrometry-based approaches facilitate rapid assay development since designing and validating assays with surrogate substrates is not necessary. Additionally, mass spectrometry does not suffer from artifacts such as compound auto-fluorescence or quenching and facilitates the screening of many enzymatic reactions for which label-dependent formats are unavailable.
GTCbio’s 3rd Assay Development and Screening Technologies conference will provide attendees with critical information to utilize in the discovery and development of assays, while keeping them informed about the latest screening technologies for both high-throughput screening and high-content screening. Topics being covered include cell based assays, high throughput screening, high content screening, in vitro assays and screening, novel assay and screening technologies, and target validation. For more information visit www.gtcbio.com.
