Can flow cytometry play a part in cell based high‐content screening?

Abstract

In parallel to gene therapy and cellular therapy it is clear that the more traditional pharmacological approaches still have a major role to play in the treatment of most diseases. Two drug-discovery strategies are widely used in the pharmaceutical industry: the so-called rational drug design and the most recent screening-based strategy. Rational drug design requires usually an excellent knowledge of the biomolecular target: molecular mechanisms of action, three-dimensional structure, etc. It is scientifically sound and often efficient but rather time consuming. To cope with an exponentially increasing number of potentially interesting targets derived from genomic and proteomic studies, the industry has developed the screening-based approach since the 1990s. It has proven to be very efficient to afford original hit compounds that may open the way to drug development. During the last decades