The National Drug Discovery Centre enables Australian medical researchers to access the latest in advanced ultra-high throughput screening, addressing a critical early challenge in the drug discovery pipeline.
We provide a fully staffed facility with an industry gold-standard robotic screening platform to miniaturise and automate your assay.
Our facilities are equipped with two ultra-high throughput robotic platforms for biochemical and cell-based assays. These configurable platforms can support incubation steps and multiple reagent additions, as well as readout options that include whole-plate fluorometric imaging, high-throughput flow cytometry, high-content imaging and multi-mode plate reader screens.
Your lab must have hands-on experience running the assay
Your reagents must be stable over the duration of the assay
Your assay must be demonstrated in 96-well format
Your assay must have a robustness > 0.4 and signal-to-background ratio > 2
You must be able to provide project-specific materials such as special cells or recombinant proteins
Your readout technology must be supported
Applicants from Australian research institutes and small-to-medium enterprises may be eligible to apply for an Australian Government-sponsored screening subsidy.
This subsidy reduces the outlay for a standard screening campaign to a small fraction of the actual cost of running it. Subsidised screens will be awarded competitively through bi-annual selection rounds. Successful applications are chosen by an independent panel of drug discovery experts from around Australia.
The charges for a subsidised project vary but would typically be only around $45,000 to screen a library of 300,000 small molecules, provided that the assay can be miniaturised to 1536-well format by our staff.
Researchers who are ineligible to apply for subsidised screens are still encouraged to contact us regarding the possibility of collaborative or contract-based projects.
The next round of applications for subsidised screens will close on 17 May 2023. Please get in touch with us now to discuss your project.