About this event
The global health challenges posed by infectious diseases continue to drive the need for innovative technologies to accelerate drug discovery. In this webinar, our guest speakers will share insights into their phenotypic drug discovery approaches and explore how these methods help uncover complex biological processes. Additionally, they will highlight the use of high-containment automated systems to screen compounds against highly pathogenic microorganisms, enabling the discovery of new therapeutics for emerging health threats.
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AGENDA
High-Throughput Phenotypic Drug Discovery for Highly Pathogenic Microorganisms Using the Caps-It system, an Automated Lab-In-A-Box
Speaker: Winston Chiu, M.Eng.
Traditional high-throughput screening (HTS) platforms are often not equipped for handling highly pathogenic viruses (biosafety level 3 and higher) due to strict biosafety requirements. To overcome this, we established a fully automated, high-containment HTS platform, the Caps-It system, that enables phenotypic drug discovery for highly pathogenic micro-organisms. To date, we have successfully screened several millions of compounds against high-priority pathogens including SARS-CoV-2 and Rabies virus. This effort resulted in the identification of hundreds of potential virus inhibitors which are currently being subjected to further confirmation, profiling, and validation. In addition to HTS, the Caps-It allows real-time data collection via high-content imaging which leads to in-depth analysis of cellular processes in infection studies on classic cell monolayers but also on organoids. We believe that the Caps-It could be deployed for future HTS programs on both ongoing and emerging infectious threats.
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Image-based Morphological Profiling of Chagas Disease (Host-Parasite Model) Uncovers Mechanism of Action Leading to Accelerated Therapeutics
Speaker: David Shum, MS, MBA
Chagas disease (CD), caused by the flagellate protozoan Trypanosoma cruzi (T. cruzi), represents an important public health problem with over 8 million people infected in Latin America, where it is endemic. Recently, it has become a potential emerging disease in non-endemic areas through migrating populations. The only two medications currently available, benznidazole and nifurtimox, have limited efficacy and undesirable side effects. With new technologies and tools now available, it may be possible to develop the new drugs for CD that are urgently needed. Here, we present our workflow using Cell Painting approach and StratoMineR software analysis to assess the morphological profiling of parasite infection on host cells.
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Winston Chiu is a specialist in phenotypic high-throughput screening for infectious diseases caused by highly pathogenic microorganism. Currently, he is an expert in a fully automated high-containment lab-in-a-box system, the Caps-It research infrastructure (https://youtu.be/cr2-fvGPKos) at the Rega Institute, KU Leuven in Belgium. One of his most significant accomplishments was achieving full operationality of this complex and custom-built system. During the COVID-19 pandemic, he played a key role in screening over three million compounds against SARS-CoV-2 contributing to the global pandemic response. In addition, he co-developed and validated a triple virus phenotypic antiviral assay to assess antiviral efficacy across three viral pathogens. Winston is focused on innovation on high-throughput screening modalities using laboratory automation in high biosafety level environments and is committed to accelerating drug discovery of both ongoing and emerging infectious diseases.
David Shum is the Group Leader for the Screening Platform at Institut Pasteur Korea, which focuses on early drug discovery, high-content, and high-throughput screening. He has worked for nearly 20 years exploring phenotypic-based approaches to unravel disease mechanisms whereby refining the drug discovery pipeline. Early in his career, David was part of a multi-institutional project at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center to develop and validate one of first high-throughput confocal microscopes. This was applied at industrial scale to screen compound and functional genomic libraries towards understanding mechanisms in oncology. In the current position at IPK, David and his team are focused on infectious diseases and building advanced phenotypic assay models along viral, parasitic, and microbial pathogens. This work combines multidisciplinary approaches in biology, chemistry, informatics including AI, to provide an essential pipeline to prepare and respond to pandemics.
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