success-story

Virtually all organisms seek to maximize fitness by matching fuel availability with energy expenditure. In vertebrates, glucose homeostasis is central to this process, with glucose levels finely tuned to match changing energy requirements. To discover new pathways regulating glucose levels invivo, we performed a large-scale chemical screen in live zebrafish and identified the small molecule […]

Pancreatic β-cell death plays a role in both type 1 and type 2 diabetes, but clinical treatments that specifically target β-cell survival have not yet been developed. We have recently developed live-cell imaging-based, high-throughput screening methods capable of identifying factors that modulate pancreatic β-cell death, with the hope of finding drugs that can intervene in […]

Epstein-Barr virus (EBV) is tightly associated with certain human cancers, but there is as yet no specific treatment against EBV-related diseases. The EBV-encoded EBNA1 protein is essential to maintain viral episomes and for viral persistence. As such, EBNA1 is expressed in all EBV-infected cells, and is highly antigenic. All infected individuals, including individuals with cancer, […]

Indoleamine 2,3-dioxygenase 1 (IDO1) is a key regulator of immune responses and therefore an important therapeutic target for the treatment of diseases that involve pathological immune escape, such as cancer. Here, we describe a robust and sensitive high-throughput screen (HTS) for IDO1 inhibitors using the Prestwick Chemical Library of 1200 FDA-approved drugs and the Maybridge […]

Homologous Recombination (HR) plays an essential role in cellular proliferation and in maintaining genomic stability by repairing DNA double-stranded breaks that appear during replication. Rad51, a key protein of HR in eukaryotes, can have an elevated expression level in tumor cells, which correlates with their resistance to anticancer therapies. Therefore, targeted inhibition of Rad51 through […]

PURPOSE: Enzalutamide, a second-generation antiandrogen, was recently approved for the treatment of castration-resistant prostate cancer (CRPC) in patients who no longer respond to docetaxel. Despite these advances that provide temporary respite, resistance to enzalutamide occurs frequently. Androgen receptor (AR) splice variants such as AR-V7 have recently been shown to drive castration-resistant growth and resistance to […]

Alarge collection of bioactivecompoundswith diverse biological effects can be used as probes to elucidate new biological mechanisms that influence a particular cellular process. Here we analyze the effects of 880 well-known small-molecule bioactives or drugs on the insulin-induced adipogenesis of 3T3-L1 fibroblasts, a cell-culturemodelof fat cell differentiation. Our screen identified 86 compounds as modulators of […]

Naivety about promiscuous, assay-duping molecules is polluting the literature and wasting resources, warn Jonathan Baell and Michael A. Walters

Spheroid-based cellular screening approaches represent a highly physiologic experimental setup to identify novel anticancer drugs and an innovative preclinical model to reduce the high failure rate of anticancer compounds in clinical trials. The resazurin reduction (RR) assay, known as the alamarBlue or CellTiter-Blue assay, is frequently used to determine cell viability/proliferation capacity in eukaryotic cells. […]