Compound Screening

Screening of compound collections is an essential step of most current drug discovery programs. Identification and profiling of suitable chemical matter requires a multitude of assays, which can be executed at the required throughput. The landscape of available technologies to perform screening experimentation is continuously evolving with the aim to more quickly select the molecules exhibiting the desired pharmacological effect. Recent developments include screening of billions of molecules in unbiased formats as well as focusing on smaller compound collections in more disease relevant formats using complex cell models. How and when compound screening has the most impact depends on the question being asked and the tools available to answer them. In this article, we describe the most common screening technologies and how they are applied to drug discovery within pharmaceutical research.