DeCode is now screening for compounds to target the gene and a key receptor.

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DeCode is screening for compounds to target the gene and a key receptor.

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In recent years Merck, Pfizer, GlaxoSmithKline and other drug giants have moved away from screening natural compounds, which is unpredictable and labor intensive, in favor of automation.

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This method of testing new drug ideas against many thousand compounds - High Throughput Screening (HTS) - is likened to searching for a very small needle in a very large haystack.

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Goodfellow's unit has so miniaturized the mass screening of such compounds that machines now replicate the countless experiments in pinhead-size droplets--1, 536 tiny wells on envelope-size plates--a process that formerly took humans untold man-hours.

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One aim of this screening is to find compounds that block communication in some species but leave others undisturbed.

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Then comes the work of screening scads of receptors against compounds to see which ones bind together--and what pattern of receptors get turned on by gardenias.

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Typical drug-screening software can handle fewer than a million compounds a day.

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High-throughput screening uses robots to test the actions of thousands of compounds against a molecular disease target (itself identified by genomics).

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Robotic screening machines, for example, in which hundreds of compounds in tiny wells are tested to see if they react with a particular biological target, can analyse thousands of compounds in a day.

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Screening Pfizer's compound collection produced some promising leads, but the compounds turned out to be toxic.

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