Using high-throughput screening in the search for new medications

German Research Foundation and the state of Rhineland-Palatinate provide funding for the Mainz Screening Center

01.02.2010

The German Research Foundation (DFG) and the German federal state of Rhineland-Palatinate are providing some EUR 360,000 to fund the establishment of a high-throughput screening center at the Mainz University Medical Center designed to discover new therapeutic agents. At the future Mainz Screening Center, MSC for short, it will be possible to investigate thousands of substances in the search for new medications in a relatively short time and to identify new mechanisms that can be exploited therapeutically. The MSC will be the first and only institution of its kind in Rhineland-Palatinate; there are currently only eight such centers in the whole of Germany. Professor Dr. Roland Stauber, head of the Molecular and Cellular Oncology unit at the Mainz University Medical Center's Department of Otorhinolaryngology, Head and Neck Surgery will be in charge of the new center.

"Cancer still represents a major challenge for medicine in general and for medical research in particular. Since therapeutic advances can only be made with a knowledge of the underlying cellular mechanisms, I am pleased that the Mainz University Medical Center, with the support of the German Research Foundation, is providing an effective instrument for exploring such mechanisms," said the Chief Scientific Officer of the Mainz University Medical Center, Professor Dr. Dr. Reinhard Urban.

The discovery of a new therapeutic agent used to be a matter of pure chance in the past. That is now no longer the case. The use of new microscopy techniques in combination with special robotic systems makes it possible to identify therapeutically relevant substances from among thousands upon thousands of chemicals. This search for the proverbial needle in a haystack is called high-throughput screening. It makes it possible to automatically analyze vast numbers of substances a day.

In Mainz, the planned MSC will be accessible to various user groups both at the Mainz University Medical Center and Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz (JGU) as well as in the state of Rhineland-Palatinate. In addition to being involved in university-based projects at the Mainz University Medical Center and the JGU institutes of Biology, Chemistry, and Pharmaceutical Sciences, the new center will also be collaborating with the new Institute of Molecular Biology, an excellence center for life sciences sponsored by the Boehringer Ingelheim Foundation, and the Institute of Biotechnology and Drug Research in Kaiserslautern. It is expected that the clinical and application-relevant theoretical developments will be such that they can be used in a vast range of fields, from academic and industry-related drug search to the research of nanotechnology-based diagnosis and treatment strategies.

The first results obtained in the field of translational research at the Department of Molecular and Cellular Oncology have already been published in the journal Sensors. "With the establishment of the Mainz Screening Center, a dream of mine which began 10 years ago has now come true," emphasized Professor Dr. Roland Stauber, the founder of the MSC. "This technology has already enabled us to identify previously unknown candidate agents with potential tumor-suppressing activity from among tens of thousands of chemical substances. The MSC represents an important step towards developing these into possible anticancer drugs."

"We particularly welcome the establishment of the Mainz Screening Center, especially in connection with the formation of our Institute of Molecular Biology. This technology is yet another important component that will ensure that Mainz as a science hub develops into an internationally leading center for molecular medicine," said the President of Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz, Professor Dr. Georg Krausch.