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P2011
Applying The Labcyte MicroClime Lid In Biological Assays To Improve Data Quality & Quantity.
Presenter Adrian Freeman, AstraZeneca, United Kingdom
Additional Authors: John Unitt, Malbinder Fagura
Successful development of robust and efficient compound screening assays is essential within the drug discovery process but this is often difficult to achieve when using primary cells. Additionally, data from the use of human tissue/primary cells needs to be maximised and so it is a requirement that we miniaturise our assays to achieve this. Previously we have assayed cytokine stimulated human chondrocytes prepared from human (OA) knee joints for nitric oxide (NO) production within a 96 well plate format. However we needed to further miniaturize this assay into 384 well plates to get as many data points as possible from a limited supply of tissue. This assay has  long incubation times prior to NO detection and evaporation of liquid from peripheral wells was a major issue leading to poor data quality. To reduce this effect we used the Microclime environmental lid (Fig 1) filled with assay buffer. The Microclime lid has previously been used within AstraZeneca Charnwood filled with DMSO for the use in storage of compound plates (Fig 2). We describe here the development of a 384 well chondrocyte assay for the profiling of compounds and present data clearly showing that application of the Microclime lid improves assay performance and efficiency.