The assay development and screening facility (ADSF) is located on the 12th floor of the Center for Life Sciences Building situated in the heart of the Longwood Medical community. The core provides investigators with access to cutting edge drug screening and automated lab equipment, a large repository of chemical libraries for identification of novel molecules that can be used to study any biological system of interest. We support assay development for high-throughput screening, provide for the screening of libraries to obtain preliminary data for grant proposals, as well as screening of large libraries for identification of leads for drug discovery and therapeutics.

The ADSF is anchored by a Hamamatsu FDSS7000EX kinetic reader, which has the capability of conducting measurements of fluorescence or luminescence in 384 wells at once, with time resolution of up to 40Hz. The equipment allows for measurements of changes in membrane potential and concentration of intracellular ions such as Ca2+ in primary cultures, stem cell-derived or trans-differentiated cells or cell lines in a fast, accurate, parallel fashion.

As a counterfoil to the Hamamatsu we have a confocal based high-content screening (HCS) platform, ThermoFisher’s Arrayscan XTI. This HCS instrument features a temperature and CO2 controlled live cell chamber to assay your biology over several days. The arrayscan XTI has an integrated liquid handler to administer your substrate of interest, well by well, capturing changes in fluorescence upto 10Hz with an enhanced CCD camera and 7 LED light source using 6 to 1536 well labware.

In partnership with another local screening facility we have access to nearly 1,000,000 unique pharmacological entities from a variety of academic and commercial vendors. The core works closely with investigators to develop and initiate large or small scale screens and can direct investigators to resources for further lead development.

The core is under the direction of Dr. Mustafa Sahin and managed by Dr. Lee Barrett. Alyssa Grantham is the Core’s dedicated Research Assistant. The Core is under the administrative guidance of Amy Weinberg, MHP, CRA, administrator of the IDDRC.