The Birmingham Drug Discovery Facility is the UK’s only academic HTS facility dedicated to antibacterial drug discovery. The University of Birmingham is committed to being at the vanguard of academic-led drug discovery and the search for the next generation of therapies that will benefit humankind. Recently, the University of Birmingham has invested heavily to develop a High-Throughput Screening (HTS) facility, which is located in the School of Biosciences at the Institute of Microbiology and Infection (IMI). The Birmingham Drug Discovery Facility contains a number of cutting-edge technologiesrequired to enable Birmingham scientists to conduct translational science.
We offer access to two fully automated drug discovery platforms. The Biochemical Screening Platform is a fully integrated robotic liquid handling system with the capability and capacity to screen thousands of chemical entities against specific in vitro biochemical assays. This is an extremely flexible system, allowing for bespoke biological assay development. The Phenotypic screening platform is also a fully integrated robotic system which has the ability to screen a variety of cell type or tissue cultures against a library of chemical entities. This parallel facility allows for the direct tandem studies of compound libraries against cell cultures to detect for resultant chemically induced biological consequences important to the drug discovery process, such as cell viability, changes in cell morphology, cell migration or the sensitive detection of the release or uptake of specific biomarkers.
For any high throughput screening laboratory, the 'jewel in the crown' is manifested by the compounds, or compound libraries, used in screening experiments. The Drug Discovery Facility holds an in house 37,000 lead-like diversity library.