Services

The DDCB network provides following services:

Project and assay guidance and development support – at 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, University of Turku

• The DDCB network offers world-class low- to ultra high throughput screening and targeted HTS/HCS support.
• Access to high-throughput screening (HTS) robotics and related instruments for this and other BF network customers
• Emerging technologies and approaches include high content screening, label-free detection, ultra-miniaturized assay formats to reduce costs and allow screening with rare reagents and specimens as well as qPCR and lysate microarray readouts.
• Development of novel technologies and ultra-miniaturized assay formats to reduce costs for end-users

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

• 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.

Chemoinformatics, molecular modeling, and virtual screening – at 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 from chemoinformatics from the national chemical collection and confirmatory testing at screening sites, making follow-up testing affordable to the user.
• Chemoinformatics support for hit compound evaluation and optimization is also supported.

Follow-up screening and testing – all the sites

• Hit analoging, SAR, Secondary screens, compound QC, prediction of in vivo properties for POC
• 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 a large national chemical collection – FIMM

• A compound collection comprising more than 140 000 synthetic drug-like chemicals, natural products and clinical drugs are provided to the users via a public, searchable web interface.
• 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. This service will be further enhanced by adding on a biologics collection of drugs and bioactive macromolecules.