The European Lead Factory has announced that it can now offer two types of phenotypic screening:

• A high-throughput, but “lower content” phenotypic approach that is suited to screening ELF’s entire compound collection, and
• A more complex “high content” screening approach using microscopy or flow cytometry to probe phenotype on a smaller subset of the compound collection

While low content assays can be live measurements or have fixed end points and involve well-averaged readouts, high content assays can be much more complex, based on live or fixed cells, multiple cell types and usually have more than one parameter as a readout. The complexity of the latter workflow makes it better suited to being performed on a smaller representative subset of the large collection.

Phenotypic screening historically has been the basis for the discovery of many drugs. Compounds are screened in cellular or animal disease models to identify compounds that cause a desirable change in phenotype. Only after the compounds have been discovered are efforts made to determine the biological targets of the compounds - a process known as target deconvolution.

Proposals for phenotypic screening approaches follow the normal review and selection process. A dedicated application form is available here.

The submission deadline for the next review and selection round is February 7, 2020.