CBC announces a high throughput screening award

March 12, 2013

CBC High Throughput Screening (HTS) award
Request for Applications

In response to the community-wide interest in High Throughput Screening (HTS), the CBC is offering a 1:1 HTS Matching Grant Program to help fund innovative small molecule discovery. The intent of this program is to support pilot projects involving biomedically-relevant targets using a HTS facility located at one of the CBC universities. The three CBC university-based HTS facilities provide an array of chemical libraries and assays, as well as the instrumentation and expertise to screen thousands of compounds. In addition, the facilities offer a variety of specialized capabilities:

Northwestern’s High Throughput Analysis Laboratory (HTA) provides a broad range of screens, including tissue culture assays, biochemical analysis, and experiments involving microbial strain collections. The HTA lab is uniquely strong in regard to nanoliter liquid handling and assays that require highly parallel kinetic analysis.
Facility website: www.northwestern.edu/hta
Contact: Chi-Hao Luan, Director; Email: luanch@northwestern.edu
University of Chicago’s Cellular Screening Center (CSC) has a robotically-integrated screening platform set up in a class-100 clean room, which allows sophisticated experiments with tissue culture cells under essentially sterile conditions. The facility’s automation capability allows an exceptionally high throughput.
Facility website: www.igsb.org/services/csc/
Contact: Sam Bettis, Director; Email: sbettis@bsd.uchicago.edu
The University of Illinois at Chicago HTS Facility offers access to liquid handling platforms that are integrated with a range of assay equipment and instruments for photometric analysis. The HTS facility provides access to over 100,000 drug-like compounds.
Facility website: www.rrc.uic.edu/hts
Contact: Kiira Ratia, Director; Email: kratia@uic.edu
Unlike other CBC award programs, cross-university collaboration is not required to apply for the CBC HTS Award. However, investigators are expected to use the CBC university-based HTS facility that best suits their project, regardless of university affiliation. The CBC HTS Award will match half of the justified expenses (up to $20,000) of a small molecule screening project via direct payment to the selected HTS facility. Applicants may be CBC university affiliates of any rank (e.g. graduate students, fellows, research faculty, or tenure-track faculty). The individual providing the non-CBC matching funds (“Sponsor”) must be identified on the application. Projects must be biomedically-related, and screening assays must be clearly explained (preferably validated) and approved by a HTS facility director. (Note: Applicants should work with HTS facility directors to design appropriate assays.) Applications will be reviewed by a committee comprised of the three HTS facilities operational directors, the CBC Scientific Directors, and faculty members associated with the HTS facilities.

Applicants must discuss potential projects with the director of their preferred HTS facility prior to submitting an application.

Application Deadlines for 2013:

Spring deadline: 5 pm, Monday, April 22, 2013
Winter deadline: TBD

Application Process:

All pages and documents listed below should be assembled into a SINGLE PDF DOCUMENT in the order listed. Please name the PDF (in all capitals) with the last name of the Sponsor listed on the application.

Page 1: Title Page
Title of the proposal
Name and contact information of the Sponsor (individual who will be providing funds to match the CBC Award)
Name, title, institution, and contact information (including email address) of key participants in the project
HTS facility at which the work will be conducted, and name of the facility director (Note: The HTS facility director will be contacted by CBC to assure his/her approval of the project.)
Aim of the screening assay (max. 20 words)
Total cost of the project and amount requested from CBC (50% of total, up to $20,000)
Estimated time-frame of the project
Page 2: Description of project and screening assay
Biomedical question/problem to be addressed, including its significance. (max. 300 words)
Description of proposed assay, including validation information (if available) and workflow. Include information on libraries to be screened. (max. 400 words)
Page 3 and beyond:
Up-to-date 2-page NIH Biosketch for the project Sponsor, including current and pending funding. List no more than 10 publications most relevant to the submitted application.
Up-to-date 2-page NIH Biosketch for each additional project participant.
Applications should be submitted via email to the CBC Executive Director Kathryn Stallcup at:
k-stallcup@northwestern.edu.

Latest News

Subscribe to RSS Feed