Drug Discovery Screening Lab hosts open house

research 1:19 Drug Discovery Screening Lab hosts open house

By:

Clark Dehart

18 Apr 2025 69

The Virginia Tech Center for Drug Discovery (VTCDD), an interdisciplinary group committed to continuing the growth and advancing the stature of the existing drug discovery and development programs at Virginia Tech, hosts an open house for researchers to learn more about the testing capabilities of the lab, including the Microlab STAR robotic platform.

The open house is a great opportunity for people to come and see what we're about. So what we do at the Screening Lab is we work with investigators at Virginia Tech to help them execute high throughput screening. To give you an example of how the screening center might be used, my laboratory has a project in which we're going to screen several thousand compounds for anti-malarial activity. Hamilton Company has provided Virginia Tech and the Center for Drug Discovery with the Hamilton STAR automated liquid Handler. And something that is very tedious and time consuming to do manually, we can do it in an automated and much more controlled fashion. What the Screening Lab does is it provides a service that's not easy to access for your typical principal investigators, and so we can help investigators identify starting points for their grant proposals or for development and publication as original research. So that's been an effective way to increase awareness of what we can do.