Orthogonal Pooled Screening Platform

Do what you’re good at with 5-fold greater efficiency — and leave the rest to us.

We provide assay-ready plates with drug-like small molecules from a 104,000 compound library dispensed in an orthogonally pooled format for a 5-fold reduction in screening volume. Just perform your assay, send in your results, and we’ll perform data de-convolution and cherry-pick hits based on your cutoff criteria. See how the OPS™ Platform works

OPS™ provides:

Five-fold reduction in screening volume: With orthogonal pooling of 10 compounds per well, each 384-well plate can contain 1,600 compounds, in duplicate, saving you time and reagents.
Assay-ready plates: You choose the best plate for your assay and we deliver compounds dispensed in sub-microliter volumes, ready for addition of enzymes and detection reagents without the need for sophisticated dispensing equipment.
Broad small molecule library: Select any combination of molecules from a core collection of 104,000 compounds, where more than 60% are novel scaffolds not typically found in commercial libraries.
Drug-like properties: Compounds have been pre-filtered to remove undesirable features such as reactivity; all compounds pass Lipinski’s rules; library has a lead-like bias toward low molecular weight compounds, with an average molecular weight of ~300.
Chemoinformatic analysis service: Professional chemoinformatic analysis with proprietary software for data deconvolution and SAR enables rapid hit selection and accelerated hit-to-lead process.
Secure IP: The OPS™ Platform operates totally blinded to target with no IP reach-through.
Compatible with a range of assays: The OPS™ Platform is compatible with a wide variety of cell-based and biochemical assay platforms, including our direct mix-and-read Transcreener® HTS Assays.

Want to learn more?

104,000 high-purity, small molecules ready to pick from the core library

The LCGC Core Collection library, biased toward low molecular weight ‘lead-like’ molecules with an average molecular weight of 300, contains 104,000 compounds (>60% are novel). Access to this library enables testing with compounds not readily available in other catalogs, while protecting intellectual property rights and fostering collaborative synergy with no risk of IP reach-through. Each compound has high analytical quality (>85% are pure) and must pass filtering criteria like Lipinski’s rule of five (RO5), lack undesirable functions and physicochemical properties, and meet high QA/QC benchmarks.

The library repository enables dynamic storage and retrieval of individual compounds stored in solution in DMSO at –20° C by a patented robot system with a high-throughput picking rates. On-demand retrieval of library sets allows provision of plates from compounds of our choice (for example, our ‘tester set’ of 8,000 compounds) or of a set of “cherry picked” compounds of your choice.

OPS™ Platform: technology and services

Traditional screening methods have used a one-compound-per-well approach. Given that the number of active compounds in any library is often quite low, other strategies have been developed to increase efficiency and reduce waste. To help improve the efficiency of HTS, each well of a prepared OPS™ plate contains a pool of 10 different library compounds, selected from a library with many core scaffolds not found elsewhere. For orthogonal pooling (also described as a self-deconvoluting matrix, or SDM), each compound is tested twice within a plate but with a different set of compounds in each well. To be classified as a “hit”, the compound must show reactivity in both wells of the plate. The net result of pooling is a five-fold reduction in the number of screening wells (e.g., 8,000 compounds in five 384-well plates), with n=2 collaboration.

The turnkey OPS™ Platform package includes:

Project scope consultation, if needed
Preparation and delivery of assay-ready plates
Expert data deconvolution of plate reader results
Compilation of SAR table for review
Cherry-picking of active hits based on specified cutoff criteria

Want to learn more?

Our partnership with Lankenau Institute for Medical Research Chemical Genomics Center

In early 2015, BellBrook Labs entered into an agreement with the Lankenau Institute for Medical Research (LIMR) Chemical Genomics Center (LCGC; Wynnewood, PA) to provide access to the Orthogonal Pooled Screening (OPS™) Platform. LCGC uses innovative technologies to enable a new model for private-public partnering in medicinal translation research. Their mission is to measurably improve successful drug discovery outcomes using far more efficient approach to HTS, by offering unique, drug-like libraries available nowhere else, couple to a powerfully enabling compound management infrastructure and data mining software. The OPS™ Platform offers startup, academic, government, and foundation laboratories a drastically more efficient and less expensive approach for rapidly finding new leads from a unique core library.

Tutorial: Orthogonal Pooled Screening (PDF)
Publications:
- Drug Dev Res. 1996 37;80-85. doi.org/10.1002/(SICI)1098-2299(199602)37:2%3c80::AID-DDR3%3e3.0.CO;2-H.
  High capacity screening of pooled compounds: Identification of the active compound without re-assay of pool members.
  Devlin JJ, Liang A, Trinh L, Polokoff MA, Senator D, Zheng W, Kondracki J, Kretschmer PJ, Morser J, Lipson SE, Spann R, Loughlin JA, Dunn KV, Morrissey MM.
- J Med Chem. 1999 Nov 4;42(22):4680-94. PubMed PMID: 10579830.
  Discovery of novel non-peptide CCR1 receptor antagonists.
  Ng HP, May K, Bauman JG, Ghannam A, Islam I, Liang M, Horuk R, Hesselgesser J, Snider RM, Perez HD, Morrissey MM.
- Assay Drug Dev Technol. 2005 3:413-24. PMID: 16180996.
  Statistical evaluation of a self-deconvoluting matrix strategy for high-throughput screening of the CXCR3 receptor.
  Ferrand S, Schmid A, Engeloch C, Glickman JF.
- Lett Drug Design Disc. 2007 4: 215–223. doi.org/10.2174/157018007780077408.
  Maximizing the Identification of Leads from Compound Mixtures.
  Warrior U, Gopalakrishnan SM, Traphagen L, Freiberg G, Towne D, Humphrey P, Kofron J, Burns DJ.
- Assay Drug Dev Technol. 2008 6:395-405. PMID: 18593377.
  Evaluation of an orthogonal pooling strategy for rapid high-throughput screening of proteases.
  Motlekar N, Diamond SL, Napper AD.
- J Biomol Screen. 2010 15:1107-15. PMID: 20930215.
  Development of a high-throughput screen for inhibitors of Epstein-Barr virus EBNA1.
  Thompson S, Messick T, Schultz DC, Reichman M, Lieberman PM.
- Chem. Biol. 2012 19:518-28. PMID: 22520758.
  Identification and characterization of small molecule antagonists of pRb inactivation by viral oncoproteins.
  Fera D, Schultz DC, Hodawadekar S, Reichman M, Donover PS, Melvin J, Troutman S, Kissil JL, Huryn DM, Marmorstein R.
- Comb Chem High Throughput Screen. 2013 16:180-8. PMID: 22934945.
  New informatics and automated infrastructure to accelerate new leads discovery by high throughput screening (HTS).
  Donover PS, Yohn M, Sim M, Wright A, Gowda S, Allee C, Schabdach AR, Reichman M.
- ACS Chem. Biol. 2014 9:1603-12. PMID: 24854633.
  Identification and Characterization of Small Molecule Human Papillomavirus E6 Inhibitors.
  Malecka KA, Fera D, Schultz DC, Hodawadekar S, Reichman M, Donover PS, Murphy ME, Marmorstein R.