Achim Brinker, Ph.D.
Associate Director of Lead Discovery
In GNF’s Assay Development and High Throughput Screening Core (AD&HTS) Core, we have three main objectives in lead discovery: 1) to support collaborative screening efforts at GNF as well as the outside academic world; 2) to develop new methodologies in high-throughput screening; and 3) to explore new ways to profile entire pathways.
We provide assay development and high throughput screening services to high priority lead discovery programs using GNF’s automated robotic system (HTTI - see photo), which enables us to routinely screen more than 1.7 million compounds in the 1536-well format against biochemical and cell-based assays. This and other customized robotic screening systems are commercially available through GNF Systems. Our activities range from early assay development over HTS and hit reconfirmation to compound profiling and lead identification. We are addressing cellular pathways and a diverse set of classes of drug targets—including kinases, proteases, GPCRs, and NHRs. On occasion, we also perform entirely unbiased and non-targeted screening campaigns.
We also seek to develop innovative new assay methodologies and to advance our screening hardware to enable more complex assay formats. Our current focus is on developing advanced technologies, such as building generic platforms for cell-based kinase assays, creating assay formats requiring medium transfers between assay plates, and implementing heterogeneous assay steps.
Finally, we are exploring creative ways to implement comprehensive pathway profiling campaigns using targeted compound libraries.
Basic Research
In addition to contributing to the drug discovery pipeline, we use GNF’s cutting-edge functional genomics technologies to identify novel drug targets. Our current focus is on cell cycle regulation and oncology.
Selected Publications
