SBS soapbox
SBS' 10th Anniversary: Cause for Celebration … & The Onset of Mid-Life Crisis?

By Bob Campbell
Chairman
SBS Board of Directors

In September 2004, SBS celebrates its 10th anniversary with an event-packed, annual conference in Orlando, Florida. Indeed, the society has accomplished a great deal in these 10 years, and has much to celebrate. Here’s why. In April 1994, a group of enthusiastic and forward-thinking scientists conceived of a non-profit society devoted to “the art and science of screening technologies and supporting industries.” In July 1994, the first board of directors was elected and officially “gave birth” to the Society for Biomolecular Sciences.

Approximately one year later, a small contingent of novice SBS volunteers assembled the first annual SBS Conference & Exhibition in Philadelphia. This unique conference was successful in attracting several hundred top scientists and vendors who discussed the latest and greatest in high-throughput screening (HTS) technologies. The thought of screening tens of thousands of wells per day was awe-inspiring. Clearly, HTS was destined to revolutionize drug discovery.

The SBS annual conference has since grown from several hundred to several thousand attendees from all over the world. The conference program has expanded in scope to include sessions not only on automation technologies and HTS per se, but also on—to name a few—bioinformatics, proteomics, genomics, chemogenomics, target identification/validation, data analysis, data mining, and high-throughput ADME/tox. In addition, the conference now offers educational short courses, tutorials/workshops, and special interest group sessions.

The SBS Microplate Standards Committee has had the notable accomplishment of establishing the SBS Microplate Standard, which has been widely adopted by the microplate and automation vendor community.

SBS has welcomed membership from pharmaceutical, biotechnology, academic, and vendors/technology-development companies, fostering co-development and improvement of novel screening technologies.

More recently, SBS has held regional meetings in both the USA and Europe.

SBS also boasts its own journal, the Journal of Biomolecular Screening (JBS), which has an impressive ISI impact rating (typically in the top 10 in the “biochemical research methods” and “analytical chemistry” categories!). SBS offers many services to its members, including the SBS web site (www.sbsonline.org), virtual seminars, SBS News, and the SBS Membership Directory/ Products & Services Guide.

I have highlighted only a few of the many significant accomplishments of SBS in its 10-year history. SBS has come a long way since 1994. High-throughput screening is no longer a novelty, but an integral portion of all drug discovery. Screening technology has improved immensely, allowing for production, analysis, and mining of millions of data points per day, miniaturization to < 1000th the volume tested in 1994 (via microfluidics, plate miniaturization, micro-chips, etc.), multiplexing of assays, high-throughput imaging (down to the single cell!), sensitive multimode plate readers that do just about everything but tie your shoes, and so on. It is my firm belief that SBS and its membership played an integral role in making the screening dreams of 1994 a reality in 2004, and I commend them for that. However, while there is much to celebrate, there is also much to contemplate.

Mid-Life Crisis?
Each year, SBS strives to further add value to the scientific community. The original mission of SBS may need to evolve in order to accomplish this task. Screening is now an accepted and established tool in drug discovery. To those outside of the screening community (perhaps some within?), the word “screening” has been interpreted as the blind execution of repetitive tasks requiring little skill, much akin to a production line in a factory (I have heard this many times!!!).

Objectively, there is some truth to this statement—that is, certain aspects of HTS are like “data factories”. However, HTS is now a minor component of what SBS is all about. I would advocate that SBS is much more than “just a screening society.” Perhaps SBS might be better described as a non-profit society focused upon the advancement of drug discovery via state-of the-art technology development and utilization (so much for short, concise descriptors!). Automation is now being used in virtually all phases of preclinical drug discovery, not just high-throughput screening. It is the way those tools are used—and what questions are asked—that are important, not the mere execution of those tasks.

In the past, SBS conferences offered many sessions that I affectionately called “tweaks for geeks,” since they dealt solely with expensive (impractical?), sexy technologies that few could afford. This was also reflected in JBS article submissions. Perhaps these sessions and papers lost sight of the goal--to discover novel drugs to meet unmet medical needs, and to do so in an economically viable fashion. Testing millions of compounds in a single day may not be enough, and might even be the wrong strategy from a fiscal standpoint (i.e., does it produce more drugs per dollar invested?).

I would submit that we SBS members need to focus on improving our compound libraries so that HTS in a conventional sense isn’t necessary (i.e., small, focused libraries with drug-like properties vs. brute force screening of whatever’s on the shelf) .

We need to ask the right questions regarding our choice of technologies, our selection/validation of targets, and the relevance of assays to the physiological context. If screening millions of compounds per day is truly necessary to find the drugs of the future, then they will only be found if we use a biologically-relevant assay. Assay development is more than just good signal windows and low CVs. Again, using the example of JBS, I have seen many manuscripts submitted where the technical execution and reproducibility is excellent but the biochemical/ biological validation falls far short.

Conversely, I have heard that reviewers have questioned some manuscripts because they have not assessed the applicability to HTS. Should we be doing this if the information is relevant to drug discovery, properly validated, and well written? I would suggest that both examples provided represent areas of improvement for SBS and JBS. I would also ask: Are we as current on our biology, biochemistry, and chemistry as we are on our technologies?

Another case in point: with automation, one can rapidly acquire a great deal of information across a family of targets. How many JBS papers and SBS presentations do we see where a single target is discussed, when so much can be learned by comparisons across targets, and not just in the context of multiplexing technologies? I would submit that in the future, SBS should consider further discussion about platform technologies (e.g., GPCR, kinase, protease, ion channel, nuclear hormone) and the commonalities/differences among target families. It is platform knowledge that may accelerate our drug discovery (including assay development) and perhaps answer some of the aforementioned questions more quickly.

Time to get off my soapbox for one day. I don’t claim to have all the answers, but I hope that together as a society we do. What do you think? Please let us know, by sending an e-mail: feedback@sbsonline.org