WELCOME

The HTS and Drug Discovery Core

Facility at NCCU’s BRITE welcomes all

NCCU and non-NCCU institutes and

industry leaders to collaborate and use

the facility to foster research in the

scientific community.

BRITE HTS Core Facility

North Carolina Central University

BRITE Building

302 E Lawson, Room 1130

Durham, North Carolina, 27707

Phone: 919-530-6845

Fax: 919-530-6600

E-mail: britehts@nccu.edu

Website: http://www.nccu.edu/brite/

Biomanufacturing Research Institute

and Technology Enterprise

HTS and Drug Discovery Core Facility

Services and Capabilities

BRITE MISSION

BRITE is a nationally-recognized program at

NCCU, which was established to train future

generations of biotechnology scientists. Our

mission is to prepare students to work in the

pharmaceutical and biomanufacturing

industry by providing a mix of classroom and

laboratory-based instruction with the latter

focused on developing skills relevant to the

industry. BRITE has a strong research focus,

particularly in the areas of drug discovery

and manufacturing technology. Our 52,000-

square-foot facility offers our faculty of

nationally-recognized scientists and

educators the ability to conduct scientific

research across various disease areas and is

supported by several cores, including the

High Throughput Screening and Drug

Discovery Core Facility.

North Carolina Central University

HTS Core Facility

The High Throughput Screening (HTS) and Drug

Discovery Core Facility is designed to suit all of your

screening needs. With our flexible screening schedule

and shared resources, we can perform the entire

screen for you or share our equipment for your

screening use. Our facility maintains a chemical library

of 450,000 compounds and houses multiple liquid

handling and assay detection instrumentation on site.

Our HTS capabilities extend from 6 to 1536-well plates

and include most all detection formats for both

biochemical and cellular assays, including Absorbance,

Fluorescence, Luminescence, Fluorescence

Polarization, Time-Resolved Fluorescence, FLIPR, High

Content Imaging, and Live Cell detection. The HTS

Core Facility has two full-time scientists dedicated to

operating the facility, managing the chemical library,

and assisting internal and external collaborators with

their screening needs. Users of the HTS Core Facility

have access to facility equipment including liquid

handlers and detection systems, as well as access to

the chemical library. The HTS Core Facility can also

assist with tissue culture for cell-based assays, assay

development, miniaturization, data analysis and SAR

analysis.

Equipment

Liquid Handling:

Biomek NX and FX (Beckman) for serial

dilution, biochemical and cell based assay

assembly for HTS, and high content imaging

preparation; 384-pintool attachments for

compound dosing

D300 (HP) digital dispenser for compound

dosing, direct dilution and combination drug

studies; down to 30 pL volume;

NSX-1536 (Nanoscreen) for rapid biochemical

assay assembly HTS (and kinetic studies)

Biomek 3000 (Beckman) for cherry picking and

serial dilution and some HTS assay assembly

Multidrop 384 (Thermo) for cell plating

installed in biosafety hoods Detection Devices—Multimode Plate Readers:

The HTS lab houses a suite of detection devices

including the SpectraMax Plus 384 and M5,

ClarioStar and PheraStar Plus, Envision, Victors,

FLIPRtetra 384, CellInsight NXT, and Incucyte live cell

imager. Other equipment include a microplate

barcode labeler, plate sealer, plate washer, and

CatXpress robotic arm.

Detection Capabilities Currently Available for HTS:

Assay Development & Validation

The HTS Core Facility can assist with Assay

Development. We adapt and optimize your assay

protocol for automated screening by:

Transitioning from 96 to 384 well format.

Miniaturizing and reducing reagent volumes.

Reducing reagent steps and wash steps.

We validate your assay under optimized conditions to

make screening ready by:

Running min and max Plates on different days.

Determining Z’ scores and inter- and intra- plate

variability.

Running control compounds in dose response for

potency determination and reproducibility.

Running under HTS and DMSO conditions

Chemical Libraries

BRITE has one of the largest

collections of proprietary

compounds among universities in

the USA. Users of the HTS Core

Facility have access to our chemical library stored on

site. We have about 400 screening-ready 384-well plates

in 1mM and 10mM concentrations in 100% DMSO. This

screening-ready set totals about 90,000 compounds, and

users have additional accessibility to the following:

350,000 Proprietary Library with a 35,000 diversity

subset.

56,000 Commercial Chemical Library.

1,280 FDA-approved Prestwick Chemical Library®

for validation purposes.

133 NCI Anticancer Drugs.

North Carolina Central University

UV and Visible Absorbance

Fluorescence Intensity (FI)

Fluorescence Polarization (FP)

Time-resolved Fluorescence (TRF)

Time-resolved Fluorescence resonance

energy transfer (TR-FRET)

Luminescence

AlphaScreen

Inject and Read

Filter-based and monochromator readers

Top and bottom well reads

Kinetic and end point reads