National Cancer Institute
An important tool to identify potential drug targets is high-throughput screening, which allows researchers to quickly conduct millions of biochemical, genetic, or pharmacological tests. Using this sophisticated, automated process, involving robotics, complex software, and sensitive detection methods, scientists can identify active compounds, antibodies, or genes involved in a particular biochemical pathway that may lead to cancer. This approach runs a screen of a potential target against individual or mixtures of known synthetic or natural compounds that may bind to or alter the function of the target. Identifying compounds that interact with the target provides a starting point for drug discovery and design, and for understanding the role of a particular biochemical process in cancer.
NCI’s Molecular Targets Development Program (MTDP) is working to identify and evaluate molecular targets that may be candidates for drug development. As the centerpiece of the Center for Cancer Research’s high-throughput efforts, the MTDP develops and evaluates high-throughput screening assays, evaluates screening results from libraries of natural products and synthetic compounds, and aids scientists in the identification of molecular targets and the development of screening tests for molecules that interact with these targets. In collaboration with NCI’s Developmental Therapeutics Program, the MTDP provides collections of compounds for screening to other researchers. The MTDP has also begun depositing screening data for more than 100,000 publicly available compounds into the NIH Roadmap project, PubChem. This allows the data to be cross-correlated with data on the same compounds from other sources and should prove to be of great utility to many researchers in the near future.
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