Publications

Selective optimization of side activities of drug molecules (the SOSA approach) is an intelligent and potentially more efficient strategy than HTS for the generation of new biological activities. Only a limited number of highly diverse drug molecules are screened, for which bioavailability and toxicity studies have already been performed and efficacy in humans has been […]

High-throughput screening (HTS) represents the dominant technique for the identification of new lead compounds in current drug discovery. It consists of physical screening (PS) of large libraries of chemicals against one or more specific biological targets. Virtual screening (VS) is a strategy for in silico evaluation of chemical libraries for a given target, and can […]

PURPOSE:This study aims to identify a novel therapeutic agent for head and neck cancer and to evaluate its antitumor efficacy.nnEXPERIMENTAL DESIGN:A cell-based and phenotype-driven high-throughput screening of approximately 2,400 biologically active or clinically used compounds was done using a tetrazolium-based assay on FaDu (hypopharyngeal squamous cancer) and NIH 3T3 (untransformed mouse embryonic fibroblast) cells, with […]

Despite advances in surgery, radiation, and chemotherapy, novel therapeutics are needed for head and neck cancer treatment. The objective of this current study was to evaluate alexidine dihydrochloride as a novel compound lead for head and neck cancers. Using a tetrazolium-based assay, the dose required to reduce cell viability by 50% (ED50) was found to […]

We report here the results of a chemical genetic screen using small molecules with known pharmacologies coupled with a cortical brain slice-based model for ischemic stroke. We identified a small-molecule compound not previously appreciated to have neuroprotective action in ischemic stroke, the cardiac glycoside neriifolin, and demonstrated that its properties in the brain slice assay […]

Cell-permeable small molecules that inhibit their targets on fast timescales are powerful probes of cell-division mechanisms. Such inhibitors have been identified using phenotype-based screens with chemical libraries. However, the characteristics of compound libraries needed to effectively span cell-division phenotype space, to find probes that target different mechanisms, are not known. Here we show that a […]

As an unbiased functional screen to identify agents activating dendritic cells (DCs), we recently developed a DC-based biosensor system, in which a stable murine DC line XS106 was engineered to express the yellow fluorescent protein (YFP) gene under the control of the IL-1beta promoter. Here we report that nystatin (NYT), an antifungal drug of the […]

The data for 3.8 million compounds from structural databases of 32 providers were gathered and stored in a single chemical database. Duplicates are removed using the IUPAC International Chemical Identifier. After this, 2.6 million compounds remain. Each database and the final one were studied in term of uniqueness, diversity, frameworks, ‘drug-like’ and ‘lead-like’ properties. This […]