We’re screening faster than ever, but are we screening smart?

High-throughput screening (HTS) has revolutionised early-stage drug discovery. It enables teams to screen hundreds of thousands of compounds at speed, helping to identify and generate leads, before high-cost pre-clinical studies.

But despite its scale, HTS often hits a wall. Compounds can look undeniably promising in vitro, however, they can underperform or fail completely, down the line during in vivo studies. The root issue? A lack of biological context. This can cause drug development to be extremely costly and time-consuming, with the average cost for developing a drug being $2.6 billion and taking 10-15 years to get to market.

As drug discovery teams face growing pressure to de-risk pipelines earlier, and avoid costly downstream failures, there’s a growing need for methods that combine HTS efficiency with physiological relevance, without sacrificing throughput. 

At Magnitude Biosciences, they've harnessed the well-established biological advantages of C. elegans to develop a high-throughput screening (HTS) platform tailored for the demands of modern drug discovery. VivoScanTM , their liquid-based C. elegans screening system, enables the efficient testing of large compound libraries at scale, providing whole-organism, functional readouts that go beyond what traditional cell-based or biochemical assays can offer. 

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