2009 © Institute for Molecular Medicine Finland FIMM
High-Throughput Screening
The High Throughput Screening Centre (HTC) provides researchers with access to high throughput screening of chemical libraries (in total about 90 000 compounds, including chemical diversity, natural compound, known bioactive and approved drug collections), a genomic siRNA library, a cDNA ORFeome library and other screening collections. The screening centre operates two facilities;
- a new fully automated ultra-high throughput (uHT) facility in FIMM uHT Center
- a self-service screening facility in Biomedicum 1
The fully automated uHT facility was built in 2009. This state of the art system is the most powerful academic screening setup in Northern Europe. The system can process up to 250 000 data-points in a single day and is suited for mammalian cell-based experiments but can also handle any standard biochemical assay format.
The second high-throughput facility is a self-service centre serving mainly the local research community as a part of Biocentrum Helsinki organization. It is operated jointly between FIMM and Biomedicum Helsinki. The facility contains the equipment to perform smaller chemical and genomic screens in a semi-automated manner.
In addition to performing and assisting with the screening, the staff of the HTC can consult and assist researchers on various other aspects surrounding chemical biology and drug discovery, such as assay development and optimization as well as advice on screening and drug discovery strategies. We also have a network of chemoinformaticians, medicinal chemists and other drug development experts.
The HTC operates as a national infrastructure on the national level within the Biocenter Finland Drug Discovery and Chemical Biology (DDCB) network. On the European level FIMM is a partner in the EU-OPENSCREEN and EATRIS ESFRI Consortia. EU-OPENSCREEN aims to integrate high-throughput screening and chemical biology infrastructure across Europe, facilitating the exchange of chemical resources and simplifying the access for the researchers. EATRIS aims to build up a translational research infrastructure network, including early drug discovery capacities.