Despite the expenditure of billions of dollars on the development of new pharmaceuticals targeting the central nervous system (CNS), there are still no therapies against many devastating neurological disorders, diseases, stroke, and trauma. Limitations of existing high-throughput screening technologies have significantly hindered discovery of pharmaceuticals for the CNS. The CNS possesses a unique and dramatic complexity that requires a new paradigm in pharmaceutical screening. We propose a high- throughput screening technology that will permit most sophisticated single-cell resolution genetic and pharmacological screens by directing neuritogenesis and synaptogenesis at sub-micron resolution and on a large scale using combinatorial protein patterns.
Despite the expenditure of billions of dollars on the development of new pharmaceuticals targeting the central nervous system (CNS), there are still no therapies against many devastating neurological disorders, diseases, stroke, and trauma. Limitations of existing high-throughput screening technologies have significantly hindered discovery of pharmaceuticals for the CNS. The CNS possesses a unique and dramatic complexity that requires a new paradigm in pharmaceutical screening. We propose a high-throughput screening technology that will permit even the most sophisticated single-cell resolution genetic and pharmacological screens by directing neuritogenesis and synaptogenesis at sub-micron resolution and on a large scale using combinatorial protein patterns. If successful, such a technology can dramatically increase the chances of success in pharmaceutical drug screens for discovery of therapeutics for neurological disorders, diseases, stroke and trauma.
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