The Screening Asia Conference 2010: an update

The conference was the first of its kind in a series of trend-setting conferences conceived and organized by Select Biosciences. The conference was held in the state-of-the-art Matrix Building, Metropolis. The topics covered were grouped into the following half-day sessions: high-content screening, high-throughput screening, RNAi screening, novel drug-discovery techniques and assay development, and screening natural extracts and small molecules. Petr Bartunek (Group Leader, Institute of Molecular Genetics, Prague, Czech Republic), Rathnam Chaguturu (Director, High-Throughput Screening Laboratories, University of Kansas, USA) and Paul Orange (Business Leader, Bio-Discovery, PerkinElmer) were the keynote speakers. The conference attendees were from academia and the biotechnology and pharmaceutical sectors. The Screening Asia 2010 was designed to address, from a regional and international perspective, how best to approach the one issue that has been at the forefront of the drug-discovery endeavors: who is best suited among academia, biotechnology and pharmaceutics to discover chemical probes against key therapeutic targets, and how best one could implement the processes.