Invention could lead to major breakthrough in drug creation

New technology could significantly decrease the cost of drug discovery, potentially leading to increased access to high-quality, personalized health care. Steven Lenhert, Florida State University, has invented a method to miniaturize the first phase of a process used by pharmaceutical companies to discover new drugs. Now, companies use large, specialized laboratories to test hundreds of thousands of compounds on different cell cultures in a process known as high throughput screening. Lenhert's technology miniaturizes that process by printing all of the compounds on a single glass surface and testing them on cells using an innovative technique involving liposome microarrays, collections of drug-containing oil drops on a surface. If fully employed in the pharmaceutical industry, this technology would make the cost of this expensive process a thousand times cheaper.