Screening Europe 2010: an update about the latest technologies and applications in high-throughput screening

This article reviews important presentations from the 7th Screening Europe Conference, and extracts general trends and developments. Technological advances, as well as novel applications are discussed, thus providing an overview on state-of-the-art high-throughput screening. Among other topics, cell-based assays were highly popular, since they reflect the clinical situation much more closely than screens based on purified drug targets. A further approach to reduce the costly attrition of drug candidates subsequent to initial screens is the use of label-free technology. By measuring desired properties directly, without the use of any reporter (e.g., calorimetric measurements of binding affinities), the selection of false positives can be decreased drastically. Additional improvements in high-throughput screening are resulting from novel technology platforms utilizing sophisticated imaging systems and/or miniaturization. These and other important topics from the Screening Europe 2010 Conference are discussed in this article, thus providing a current snapshot of the field.