FIMM participates in HTS reproducibility study

Under the lead of Jani Saarela and Swapnil Potdar, FIMM participates in a first-ever high-throughput screening reproducibility study headed by the National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences (NCATS) and the Institute of Molecular and Translational Medicine (IMTM).

Among the twelve participating institutions and pharma companies is also , the Oslo node for the Nordic EMBL Partnership in Molecular Medicine. All member facilities utilize the well-established Library of Pharmacologically Active Compounds for their comparative experiments. Study participants perform quantitative high-throughput screening against two robust luciferase biochemical assays with enzymes from Photinus pyralis and Renilla reniformis.

All experiments are executed with identical reagents and protocols supplied by . The participants will provide NCATS and FIMM with the raw data before the library compounds are un-blinded. Ultimately, all data analyses will be independently performed by NCATS, FIMM and each participant individually.

Although the assays are known to be robust, several other factors could affect reproducibility, such as instrumentation, consumables and data analysis procedures. This important study has been carefully designed to identify sources of variation among participating centers and the results will be widely disseminated to improve the reliability of translational research practices.

The study is part of the EATRIS Quality Initiative, which is led by Andreas Scherer (FIMM). The initiative encompasses several international reproducibility and guideline studies with involvement of EATRIS sites. EATRIS, the European Infrastructure for Translational Medicine, is always interested in supporting studies for improvement of data quality and reproducibility, corner stones of translational research for clinical application. For more information, please contact .