Cell culture assay process may speed discovery of new drugs

The technology has the potential to make the drug-discovery process quicker and more cost-effective, according to inventor BioCroi — a spin-out of Trinity College Dublin.

As part of this drug-discovery process, diseased and cancerous human cells are cultured in microplate wells and then treated with various combinations of existing and promising new agents.

While current systems for screening are highly automated, screening still represents an enormous challenge — testing 33 different reagents, for example, would create around nine billion possible pairwise combinations (2³³) — requiring significant resources.

‘You’re looking for a needle in a haystack,’ Peadar Mac Gabhann, managing director of BioCroi told The Engineer.

‘Often the bottleneck in a large screening procedure is the cells. Typically a large multinational would use up to two million wells in a screening experiment, so you have to produce sufficient quantities of cells in order to populate those wells, so if you can reduce the requirement down by a thousand-fold, that’s significant.’