High Content Analysis and High Content Screening Applications

High Content Screening (HCS) can be used for a broad range of applications in Life Science Research, find the most common approaches below:

Target identification - Genome-wide functional siRNA screening

Primary screening - Screening of libraries containing hundreds of thousands of compounds with meaningful functional cellular readout, functional screening of focussed libraries.

Secondary screening / follow up testing - Dose responses for active compounds from primary screening, complementary assay to primary screening in order to identify false positives. Time courses of the assay in live cells in order to get mechanistic information on compound action.

Safety assessment: In vitro tests using organ specific cells (e. g. hepatocytes, neurons) in order to get early information on the side effects of drugs. Primary human cells are employed with very limiting cell sources taking advantage of the inherent single cell sensitivity of imaging based methods which can provide robust read-outs with much fewer cells than other methods.

Systems biology: Genome-wide functional siRNA screening. Recent advances in yeast biology, i. e. the availability of genome-wide collections of gene-knockout mutants, has greatly facilitated yeast-based gene function discovery. This requires high resolution automated microscopy to visualize the small yeast cells.

Stem cell biology: The search for stem cell based therapies and scalable human primary cell sources for drug discovery have created an enormous need for stem cell reprogramming and differentiation screening methods. The fact that in every step of such development the cell population will contain undifferentiated stem cells, progenitors in their various stages, fully differentiated organ specific cells plus stroma, makes the use of imaging and multiple labels for differentiation markers a necessity.