St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital was founded in 1962 by the late entertainer Danny Thomas to “advance cures, and means of prevention, for pediatric catastrophic diseases through research and treatment”. At St. Jude, no child is denied treatment on the basis of race or religion, and no family ever receives a bill from St. Jude for their child’s treatment. St. Jude handles all costs not covered by insurance and total treatment cost for patients with no insurance.

The hospital’s vision to be the world leader in advancing the treatment and prevention of catastrophic diseases in children is developed through excellence in patient care and through strong programs in basic, translational and clinical medicine. The HTS Center is part of the Department of Chemical Biology and Therapeutics, which works, together with other St. Jude research faculty, to discover and develop new chemical entities that increase understanding of the pathophysiology of catastrophic pediatric diseases or that function as therapeutic leads for the treatment of such diseases.

The HTS Center at St. Jude was established in 2006. The HTS Center uses both commercially available chemical libraries and St. Jude’s own repository of chemical compounds designed by chemists in the Department of Chemical Biology and Therapeutics for probe development and drug discovery.

The staff of the HTS Center collaborate with research faculty at St. Jude to develop assays, validate them and miniaturize the assays so that they are amenable to automation. After a screening assay is successfully developed, the HTS Center conducts the screening experiments using the assay and executes the appropriate secondary screenings to assist in determining mechanism of action of any compound “hits” from the primary screen.

The HTS Center at St. Jude employs state-of-the-art automation and assay technologies. It is located in the Integrated Research Center. The HTS Center can perform biochemical and cell-based (BSL2+ compliant) assays using an on-site library of 525,000 compounds. Full siRNA sets for mouse and human genomes are also available. All compound and siRNA libraries are stored in a REMP designed automated compound store with the capacity to store 1 million compounds or other materials (e.g., RNAi molecules).

The HTS Center has multiple integrated screening robots that contain various liquid-handlers and high-throughput plate readers for a variety of assay outputs including Alphascreen®, fluorescence intensity, fluorescence polarization, time-resolved fluorescence, luminescence, and absorbance. The HTS Center also has automated imaging systems for cell-based high-content screening. The robots include Staubli robotic arms for moving multiwall plates from station to station; Liconic incubators, each with a capacity of up to 242 plates; and scheduling software that controls the screening system operation.