Services

The DDCB network provides following services:

Project and assay guidance and development support – all sites

• Joint advisory panel to help scientists with drug discovery technologies, processes and strategies
• Assay development and optimization is often a bottleneck in drug discovery and chemical biology so we provide this support, both in terms of hands-on support as well as guidance and access to the best possible instrumentation and technologies

Chemical screening – FIMM and Faculty of Pharmacy, UH, BioCity Turku

• World-class medium to high throughput screening and targeted HTS/HCS support
• Access to high throughput screening (HTS) automation and related instruments
• Emerging technologies and approaches include high content screening, label-free detection, ultra-miniaturized assay formats to allow screening with rare reagents and specimens as well as qPCR and lysate microarray readouts
• Development of novel technologies and miniaturized assay formats to reduce costs for end-users

Drug sensitivity and resistance screening (DSRT) and drug repurposing – FIMM, UH

• The DSRT platform at FIMM allows users to profile cellular model systems and ex vivo clinical samples against an annotated set of signal transduction inhibitors and approved oncology drugs
• The current platform offers a set of more than 500 clinical compounds (with translational implications)
• Analysis and interpretation support is provided by the DDCB network
• The DSRT platform is poised to provide opportunities for exciting translational outcomes, such as unexpected therapeutic benefits to diseases, as seen in our studies of leukemia samples

Imaging-based high throughput screening – FIMM, UH, BioCity Turku

Chemoinformatics, molecular modeling, and virtual screening – Biocenter Kuopio, Faculty of Pharmacy, UH, and BioCity Turku

• The DDCB network brings together nationwide expertise in virtual screening using different technologies and different target class experience
• DDCB network offers cherry-picking of hit compounds by chemoinformatics from the national chemical collection and confirmatory testing at screening sites, making follow-up testing affordable to the user
• Chemoinformatics for hit compound evaluation and optimization is also supported

Synthesis of novel drug candidates and hit/lead optimisation – Biocenter Kuopio

• Synthesis and optimization of novel target-based active compounds in close collaboration with molecular modelling and drug design laboratory
• Synthesis of novel transporter-utilizing tissue-, cell-, or organelle-targeted compounds/prodrugs to optimize ADMET properties of drug candidates
• Complimentary evaluation of drug delivery to the target sites (in vitro / in vivo)

Follow-up screening and testing – all sites

• Hit analoging, structure activity relationships, secondary screens, compound QC, prediction of in vivo properties for proof-of-concept
• Assay expertise at the participating partner sites all bring capacity to support users in follow-up testing beyond screening to take screening hits towards a proof-of-principle compound
• In particular, Faculty of Pharmacy offers world-class expertise in in vitro and in silico pharmacological profiling of compounds
• Faculty of Pharmacy also provides the capacity and expertise to validate integrity, stability and metabolism of chemicals with mass spectrometry

Access to large national chemical collections – FIMM, UH, BioCity Turku

• Compound libraries comprising more than 300 000 compounds
• Automated nanoscale dispensing systems allows for the users to access the compounds as part of pre-defined or in user-defined sets
• A collection of drugs and state-of-the-art bioactive tool compounds are also available one-at-a-time or in small subsets for biologists interested an affordable source for best-in-class inhibitors and other bioactives