High-Throughput Screening (HTS) Services of SARS-CoV-2 Drug Candidates

The outbreak of a novel coronavirus (SARS-CoV-2) has been a global concern that spurs an urgent need for antiviral drug discovery. With years of experience in antiviral drug development, Creative Biolabs has combined with integrated, multidisciplinary drug discovery expertise and unparalleled scope of capabilities in drug candidates screening, effective viral inhibitors discovery, therapeutic antibody development and vaccine exploration. Our high-throughput screening (HTS) technology can rapidly identify promising antiviral agents against SARS-CoV-2 infection from large libraries of approved drugs and pharmacologically active compounds, inhibitors, proteins, antibodies and peptides.

Importance of HTS in Drug Discovery

HTS is an automated process used in drug discovery to rapidly identify hits from compound libraries, such as active compounds, inhibitors, proteins, antibodies and peptides. HTS often uses a biological target to assay the activity and efficiency of thousands of potentially useful compounds and screen the most promising drug candidates to perform the downstream development processes. With the ability to provide starting points for drug discovery, HTS has been widely used in the field of antiviral pharmaceuticals for drug discovery and validation.

Fig.1 Screening for anti-HCoV-OC43 compounds. (Shen, 2019)

Elements of HTS

To guarantee the success of HTS analysis, four elements are necessarily to be thoroughly considered. For antiviral candidates, HTS has shown great potential in broad-spectrum anti-CoV agents discovery. By screening large and entire libraries of approved drugs and pharmacologically active compounds, inhibitors, proteins, antibodies and peptides, we can get effective antiviral agents against CoV infection.

• Compounds library
  

  A qualified compounds library is necessary to streamline the drug discovery process. For antiviral candidates, the libraries vary from being general with thousands of approved small molecule drugs to a more specifically tailored to a family of related targets (such as protease, nucleoside analogue, and RNA polymerase). Typical libraries might include a range of proteins or peptides.

• Suitable assays
  

  The HTS assays must be easy to replicate and suitable for automation. Best of all, the screening process can run without operator supervision under the premise of stable reagents and reaction conditions.

• Robotic system
  

  The robotics system has greatly facilitated the automated processes, including sample preparation, handling and data analysis. Therefore, scientists can easily and reliably generate and use large datasets from HTS to discover novel antiviral drugs.

• Data analysis system
  

  The data analysis is a key and decisive step of HTS. The system takes all the results generated from the assays and screens them for positive hits.

Our HTS Services for SARS-CoV-2 Drug Candidates Discovery

For antiviral candidates, HTS has shown great potential in broad-spectrum anti-CoV agents discovery. Based on SARS-CoV and MERS-CoV, HTS of large compounds libraries (approved drugs and pharmacologically active compounds, inhibitors, proteins, antibodies and peptides) has identified several effective antiviral agents against CoV infection.

Although HTS is an automated screening process, there are still many steps that need to be carefully monitored along the way. Each statistical parameter is valuable to the drug screening process. Creative Biolabs provides a complete set of technical services and scientific support to bring valuable and potent novel drug candidates for our clients.

Fig.2 Our comprehensive services of HTS.

Discovering new antiviral drugs is a long and tedious process. HTS provides a flexible and reliable method for drug discovery. If you are interested in drug discovery to fight against SARS-CoV-2 infection, please feel free to contact us for more professional technical support.

Reference

1. Shen, L.; et al. High-throughput screening and identification of potent broad-spectrum inhibitors of coronaviruses. Journal of virology. 2019, 93(12): e00023-19.

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