The faculty at the University of Iowa is engaged in a mission of research and healthcare to advance our understanding and the treatment of diseases. Currently, the University of Iowa houses state-of-the-art facilities focused on proteomics, microscopy, flow cytometry and imaging, however our mission of finding novel molecules to understand and treat diseases would be greatly advanced by a High Throughput Assay Workstation. This proposal requests funds to obtain a High Throughput Assay Workstation (Drug Discovery Robot) for a new High Throughput Screening (HTS) facility that units within the university are committed to establishing. The requested Assay workstation will enable investigators to optimize and screen small molecule libraries (ca. 100,000 compounds) in formats of 96-, 384- and 1536-well plates. The system has an integrated plate/compound storage module with a temperature-controlled incubator, complete liquid handling robotics, and a high-speed plate reader with multiple detection modes for fluorescence, absorbance, luminescence, and AlphaScreen"""""""". The system will be custom engineered and controlled with a single software suite to allow the user-friendliest experience, while maintaining the highest speed and precision for screening. In addition, this system will allow investigators to create new peptide libraries that could be screened by other investigators at the university that use the workstation. This proposal for the purchase of the Assay Workstation forms the instrumental foundation for a newly planned HTS facility that has guaranteed support from the University, the Institute for Clinical Translational Science, and the basic science departments in the Carver College of Medicine and the College of Pharmacy, where the instrument and facility will be housed. No such instrumentation exists at the University of Iowa, and in this application, researchers from across many units on campus express their need and support for such an instrument to further their NIH-funded research programs, with focuses on new drug discovery, target validation, compound library construction, and the development of novel molecular tools to answer basic scientific questions.
