Oligonucleotide encoded chemical libraries

Abstract

This application provides a bead with a covalently attached chemical compound and a covalently attached DNA barcode and methods for using such beads. The bead has many substantially identical copies of the chemical compound and many substantially identical copies of the DNA barcode. The compound consists of one or more chemical monomers, where the DNA barcode takes the form of barcode modules, where each module corresponds to and allows identification of a corresponding chemical monomer. The nucleic acid barcode can have a concatenated structure or an orthogonal structure. Provided are method for sequencing the bead-bound nucleic acid barcode, for cleaving the compound from the bead, and for assessing biological activity of the released compound.

Description

CROSS REFERENCE TO RELATED CASES[0001]This application claims the benefit of, and priority to, U.S. Provisional Patent Application Ser. No. 62 / 562,905 filed Sep. 25, 2017, and U.S. Provisional Patent Application Ser. No. 62 / 562,912, also filed Sep. 25, 2017, the contents of which are incorporated herein by reference in its entirety.FIELD OF THE DISCLOSURE[0002]The disclosure relates to high-throughput screening using a library of compounds, where the compounds are bound to beads, or contained within beads, each bead containing multiple copies of one kind of compound, where further, the bead also contains DNA tags that encode the identity or synthetic history of the compound that is contained in or on the bead. The disclosure so relates to high-throughput assays performed in picowells, where the picowells contain compound-laden beads and assay materials. The disclosure further relates to releasing the bead-bound compounds and screening them for biological activity. Broadly, the discl...

AI Technical Summary

Benefits of technology

The patent text describes a system for conducting biochemical assays using picowells. The system includes caps that fit into the openings of the picowells to prevent evaporation and leakage of fluid inside. The caps can be designed to minimize evaporation or leakage of the fluid. The system also includes a bead with multiple compounds and barcodes, which can be used to screen for compounds that activate the MDM2 E3 ubiquitin ligase. The system can be used to increase the intracellular concentrations of p53, a protein involved in cancer treatment.

Problems solved by technology

In many cases, a large number of initial hits are found toxic to the body or cross reactive with other proteins in the body, rendering the target-based selection an inefficient method for drug screening.

The need for a pre-selected target is also an inherent limitation, since it requires the biological underpinning of disease to be well-known and understood.

Screening compounds against an entire organism is a difficult, expensive, and very low-throughput task.

The obvious screening campaign combining different cell models with different drug candidates to look for phenotypic responses is fraught with technical limitations as assays are limited to microtiter plate formats and imaging modalities, both of which are severely limited in throughput.

Despite the rapid rise in high-throughput single-cell RNA-sequencing (RNA-seq) methods, including commercialized versions of automated platforms such as the Fluidigm C1, 10×Genomics or 1CellBiO systems, the application of single-cell RNA profiling for target agnostic high-throughput drug screening and target discovery is constrained by the lack of methods that can efficiently partition different drugs to different cells.

While incubating cells or tissues under different perturbations within well plates, followed by single-cell analysis and comparisons between transcript profiles can be done, the number of drugs that can be examined is limited by the plate capacity.

Further, the need to prepare barcoded mRNA from each sample in isolation and then perform comprehensive RNA profiles for every sample, creates a major bottleneck, as well.

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