High Content Screening: An Introduction to Instrumentation, Assay Development, Screening, Image and Data Analysis

High-content screening is a powerful technology platform for implementing functional cell-based assays that allow truly multi-parametric analysis in the physiological context of intact cells. This course provides an introductory level overview of the state-of-the-art components of HCS together with some showcases of high-content screens in industry and academia.

Who Should Attend?

• Those who plan to develop or apply high-content analysis / screening technologies or who are looking to implement HCA/HCS infrastructure and capability at their organization or labs
• Individuals with first experience in HCA/HCS but want to get a systematic overview, learn more about good practice in assay development and particularly how to manage and analyze large scale data

Course Benefits

This course will provide:

• An introduction to all aspects of HCS including data analysis
• An overview on major categories and thereof examples of HCS instrumentation
• Guidance to assay selection and systematic optimization
• A demonstration of good practice in assay validation and screening
• An introduction to principles of image analysis and review of various commercial and open source software such as CellProfiler
• An introduction and examples of multi-parametric data analysis using supervised and unsupervised approaches
• Review of data analysis and visualization tools
• Presentation of case studies of assay development and screens
• On demand, discussion on hit verification and target deconvolution strategies

Course Topics

• Introduction to High-Content Analysis and Screening (HCA / HCS)
• HCS instrumentation overview
• Reagents and assay development for HCS
• Image analysis
• Data management and analysis
• Case studies of high-content RNAi and small molecule screens

Instructors

Eberhard Krausz, Ph.D.
ChemBioCon
Wiesbaden, Germany

Eberhard Krausz, Ph.D. as a group leader in target validation and early drug discovery (oncology) for Evotec (France). Before Evotech, he co-founded VIB Discovery Sciences, has supported scientists and teams during various positions in industry (Tibotec, J&J/Janssen) and academia. He specializes in technology selection, target identification & validation, the development of physiologically relevant cell-based assays, screening and drug discovery. In 2003-2008, he led the central high-content screening labs at the Max Planck Institute in Dresden, Germany and before that held responsible positions in biotech industry at Cenix BioScience (Germany) and Cyclacel (Scotland, UK) dealing with RNA interference and drug discovery.

In his private time, Eberhard loves teaching courses under his brand name ChemBioCon and has been a SLAS Fellow member since 2022. He has been serving several committees and councils at SLAS.

Martin Stöter
Max Planck Institute of Molecular Cell Biology and Genetics (MPI-CBG), Dresden, Germany

Martin Stöter joined in 2006 the High-throughput Technology Development Studio (TDS) at the Max Planck Institute of Molecular Cell Biology and Genetics (MPI-CBG, Dresden, Germany) as a research scientist, where he was responsible for running large RNAi and chemical screening campaigns. Over the past years assay development, automated microscopy, image and data analysis of high-content screening projects have become his key expertise. Before, he has worked at the Leibniz Institute of Virology and the University of Ulm (both Germany). By training he is a biochemist (Ruhr University Bochum, Germany).