Louis Scampavia, Ph.D.

Progress in drug discovery is often coupled to parallel advancements in instrument technology. In our department, High Throughput Screening (HTS) robotics is employed to accelerate the drug discovery process thorough full automation of large scale screening experiments. HTS technology can be used to execute and analyze hundreds of thousand of experiments against large compound libraries to identify a few select compounds of therapeutic value. These “therapeutic leads” provide important insight and basis for the medicinal development of novel drugs for clinical application.

Research efforts are currently focused on:

— Working with collaborators to develop biological assays for HTS compatibility.

— Performing exploratory HTS campaigns for drug lead discovery.

— Technology development and instrumentation for the advancement of HTS robotics.

Collaborative efforts are coordinated with a large community of scientists and include TSRI and UF faculty, Florida researchers, and academia often funded through the National Institutes of Health, Department of Defense and private foundations.