The pancreatic
beta cells of a specially bred zebrafish glow yellow to indicate
the production
of insulin. The pancreatic cells not responsible for producing
insulin glow
red. Credit: Johns Hopkins Medicine
New form of high throughput screening could significantly
shorten drug discovery for many diseases, researchers say
(August 19, 2015) In
experiments with 500,000 genetically engineered zebrafish embryos, Johns
Hopkins scientists report they have developed a potentially better and more
accurate way to screen for useful drugs, and they have used it to identify 24
drug candidates that increase the number of insulin-producing cells in the
pancreas
The novel fish embryo technique, which the researchers say
may yield new treatments for diabetes and potentially speed new drug
discoveries for other diseases, is described in the Aug. 14 edition of eLife.
“More studies need to be done, but we think there’s potentially no limit on the
diseases this screening technique could be applied to other than the human
imagination,” says Jeffrey Mumm, Ph.D., associate professor of ophthalmology at
the Johns Hopkins Wilmer Eye Institute and McKusick-Nathans Institute of
Genetic Medicine at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine.
Essentially, says Mumm, their method is an adaptation of
high throughput screening (HTS), an automated system developed in the 1980s
that uses robotic equipment to “dose” cell or tissue samples with candidate
drugs in wells of lab dishes known as microtiter plates. The plates act as
miniature test tubes and enable specially programmed computers to find chemical
compounds that produce a desired effect, such as prompting cells to produce
particular proteins or increase in number, positive findings known as hits.
Because the microtiter plates contain hundreds of wells and the entire process
is automated, tens of thousands of samples can be processed daily, increasing
the chances of finding a hit quickly.