Author: Beverley Rabbitts

Save the date! May 5 is the CSC symposium

Posted on by Beverley Rabbitts

We’re excited about our upcoming UC Santa Cruz Chemical Screening Center Grand Reopening Celebration and Research Symposium! Please have a look at the formal invitation, which includes a link to register. We also have a link where anyone can make a voluntary donation to the symposium fund. The symposium will be aimed at a general scientific audience, but all are welcome to attend. And we have a link where you can buy merchandise with our symposium theme art!

Calling all presenters: If you want to apply to give a poster and/or talk, please fill out a very brief form with your presentation title by April 15. We have slots for 5 faculty talks and 5 trainee talks, as well as lots of room for posters. It will be exciting to see all the projects using our resources in one place and have some stimulating discussions. There will be prizes! The full agenda will be made available once we have the talk titles so please send yours ASAP.

a picture of a person holding a microplate in the lab, with the invite details below.

 

We have 2 amazing guest speakers lined up, not to be missed!

The opening plenary:

Maureen Hillenmeyer, PhD

CEO and Founder
Hexagon Bio

headshot of Maureen Hillenmeyer

The closing plenary:

Michelle Arkin, PhD

Distinguished Professor and Chair of Pharmaceutical Chemistry, UC San Francisco
Director, UCSF Small Molecule Discovery Center

Photo of Michelle Arkin

Questions? Please email Beverley Rabbitts.

New chemical libraries are in!

Posted on by Beverley Rabbitts

We have two new commercial libraries to offer! 8,387 known bioactives (includes FDA-approved for repurposing) from TargetMol, in the form of 27 384-well plates (pictured to the left), and 64,000 synthetic drug-like diversity compounds from ChemDiv, in the form of 200 384-well plates (pictured to the right). Stay tuned for our daughter plating progress, which we will do using our PlateStacked Janus MDT 96-channel pipettor into Echo-compatible low-dead-volume cyclic olefin plates.

Visitors from Ono Pharmaceutical

Posted on by Beverley Rabbitts
Beverley and three Ono Pharmaceutical guests standing in the CSC lab space
Caption: Beverley showing three guests from Ono Pharmaceutical around the CSC lab space.

2022 UC DDC RFA1 LOI form screenshotThe CSC was delighted to host guests from the over 300 years old company that made the first prostaglandin therapeutic product (1974) and first anti-PD1 therapeutic antibody product (2014); both were developed with partners in academia. Their visit aimed to foster relationships with UCSC experts in oncology, neurology, immunology, and pathophysiology.

Faculty are invited to apply for 50-100k/1yr seed grants via UC DDC for drug discovery projects in these areas. To submit a project for consideration, please fill out the LOI form at the end of the RFA here (form is pictured to the right) by the end of JULY 2022 with detailed instructions available here. Ono is especially interested in funding early stage projects that involve identifying first-in-class drugs and/or drug targets. Good luck to all applicants!

We look forward to future interactions with our new friends at Ono Pharmaceutical.

Please note that we also have an opportunity for seed funds from Astellas, also through the UC DDC. You can access the application form here and read the RFA here. The due date is the end of AUGUST 2022.

Echo acoustic dispenser installed!

Posted on by Beverley Rabbitts

We’re excited to unveil our new Echo! It’s ready to use.

It is ideal for dispensing small volumes of compounds from special 384 or 1536 format source plates to a wide variety of destination plates. It does so 2.5 nl at a time, one well at a time, in a fully programable way – it takes all the manual labor out of cherry picking, dose response curves, reformatting, making replicates, rearranging, randomizing , etc. See an informational video here. Each user will be required to have pre-arranged CSC assistance to operate this until you have run it successfully on at least 5 occasions. E-mail Beverley to arrange training, a demonstration, or pilot experiment. Here are some pics of the install in progress today.

Echo being uncrated by several guys

Raghu installing Echo software

New events calendar

Posted on by Beverley Rabbitts

We now have a Google calendar for CSC events. It will have the most up to date information about any training, seminars, etc. being offered to users. We recommend that users subscribe to the CSC calendar (and its automatic alerts), as well as the CSC Google Space to get all the up-to-date information.

We’ve had several exciting events for users in the past few weeks:

  • A “lunch and learn” seminar with presentations by Beverley Rabbitts and Serena Chan from Perkin Elmer (the old flyer is below)
  • Phenix user trainings in person with Robert Graves from Perkin Elmer
  • Flex robot and PlateWorks training in person with Robert Graves from Perkin Elmer
  • EL406 user training in person with Deanna Leung from BioTek
  • Remote EnVision user training with Bill Ortiz from Perkin Elmer

flyer for 22 March 11:30am seminar on plate reader techs

The new Phenix imager is available to users!

Posted on by Beverley Rabbitts

Introducing our very exciting new acquisition: the Opera Phenix Plus confocal high content / high throughput microscope with 13 emission filter options, 4 excitation lasers, and a variety of objectives including 20x and 63x water objectives. We kicked off this new resource with two group training sessions on February 24, 2022 led by Robert Graves from Perkin Elmer. Please email Beverley Rabbitts if you want training and access.

Robert describing how the Phenix works to a group of 5 usersphoto of Robert showing a group of users how to use the Phenix