Session Speaker

High content bioimaging platform for drug discovery and dissection of the host-pathogen interactions
Rekha G. Panchal, Krishna Kota, Kevin Spurgers, Dutch Boltz and Sina Bavari

Visual inspection of cells infected with a pathogen is a fundamental tool to study cellular and molecular pathogenesis. High content imaging (HCI) has emerged as an important platform technology for early drug discovery from target identification through in vitro ADME/Tox. The advantage of high content imaging is it is automated, real time and has capabilities such as confocal, single cell kinetics or endpoint imaging. Each bioapplication reports cellular data at the individual cell level as well as at the whole well and subpopulation level. The focus is now on implementing multiplexed assays, developing and using advanced reagents and developing and harnessing more sophisticated informatics tools. Multiplexed HCS assays have the potential to dramatically improve the early drug discovery process by creating systems cell biology profiles on the activities of compounds.

To study the interactions of highly virulent pathogens with the host and screen and identify druggable molecules, we designed HCI assays to monitor entry, replication or exit of the pathogen from the host. In addition, multiple pathway-specific assays were designed to simultaneously profile the cellular signaling that might play a key role in the mechanism of action for novel classes of compounds with therapeutic potential. Subsequent screening of small molecule chemical library and identification of lead therapeutics for Ebola and Marburg viruses will be presented.