Robotic whole organism HTS platform for drug discovery and development

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): Our goal is to create a compact, affordable, fully automated, screening system for large-scale drug 2 testing in living small animal disease models (e.g., worms, flies, and fish). Modern drug discovery is 3 driven by high-throughput screening (HTS) systems that have the capacity to evaluate large chemical 4 compound 'libraries'. The majority of hits identified by in vitro HTS assays fail at animal testing stages 5 after significant investments in time and costs have already been made. This increase drug 6 development costs and presents a critical barrier to the discovery of novel therapies. A solution to this 7 problem is to integrate small animal disease models into HTS platforms at the earliest stage of the 8 discovery process. Powerful 'high-content' in vivo screening systems use automated imaging 9 processes to collect phenotypic data following drug exposures. However, these methods cannot attain 10 true HTS capacities and therefore cannot fully address current