Biomedical Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
HTS FLOW CYTOMETRY,
SMALL-MOLECULE DISCOVERY,
AND THE NIH MOLECULAR
LIBRARIES INITIATIVE
L ARRY A. S KLAR AND B RUCE S. E DWARDS
4.1
INTRODUCTION AND OVERVIEW
Once commercial flow cytometers became widely established in research and clinical
laboratories in the 1980s, sample handling evolved from a single sample tube at a time
manual delivery format, first to automated tube handling systems in the 1990s and
then to plate-based sampling systems in the 2000 decade. In concert with advances in
data acquisition, data analysis was enhanced with automated and batch processing
systems. In the 1990s, NIH signaled important changes in federally funded science in
theUnited States. In addition to the HumanGenome Project for sequencing the human
genome, the NIH initiated a program in Biomedical Engineering Research Partner-
ships that gave validity to scientific approaches based on novel technology. Early in
the next decade, the NIH Roadmap and its Molecular Libraries initiative fully
validated discovery research with its emphasis on generating new tools to accelerate
biomedical research. With the economic environment culminating in the biotechno-
logy crash of 2000, the recession of 2008, and the slowdown in the pharmaceutical
pipeline to produce new drugs from novel chemical entities, opportunities began to
emerge for high-throughput screening (HTS) and small molecular discovery in
academic laboratories and research institutions.
The purpose of this chapter is to discuss how the changes at NIH, coupled with new
economic realities in Pharma and opportunities in flow cytometry, have led to the
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