Capacity & Equipment

Our Lab uses state-of-the-art dedicated equipment at the UCY Medical School for our research activities. The Lab has the technical capacity to do research in areas of in vitro and in vivo pharmacology, in various models and systems.
The core of our expertise is on drug discovery & repurposing and pharmacological profiling using high-throughput drug screening methods for screening a wide drug library with novel and clinical drugs against various assays and models.

Have a look at our current work and projects here. 
​

Research capacity

• A diverse compound library with experimental compounds, clinical drugs and natural extracts (>800 compounds).
• A diverse bank of healthy mammalian cell lines, cancer cell lines and bacterial species. 
• Application of High-Throughput Screenings (up to a 1536-well plate format) ​in various detection modes (absorbance, luminescence,  fluorescence, time-resolved fluorescence, fluorescence polarisation, FRET, TR-FRET, Alpha, BRET) for various formats (ELISA, AlphaScreen, HTRF).​
• A portfolio of various in vitro assays in mammalian cells (cell viability, colony formation, proliferation, metabolic activity, oxidative stress, protein mass, ATP, apoptosis/necrosis, cytostasis, DNA damage, invasion/migration, antioxidant efficacy, enzyme kinetics).
• A portfolio of various in vitro assays in bacteria (microplate growth inhibition, resazurin turbidometry, agar disk-diffusion, time-kill kinetics, agar dilution, live/dead stain, bacterial membrane stability, mammalian cell infection, kinetic dose accumulation, agar colony forming, multi-drug resistance, persistent population growth).
• Assessment of various pharmacological endpoints in bacteria: Minimum Inhibitory Concentration (MIC), Inhibitory potency (IC50), Minimum Bactericidal Concentration (MBC), Spectrum efficacy (SE), Time-Dependence Activity profile (TDA), Dose-Accumulation Activity profile (DAA), Bacteriostatic activity profile (BA), Metabolic activity profile (MA).
• Pharmacological profiling in vitro against targets (target affinity, efficacy, potency, selectivity/specificity, allosteric agonism, enzyme inhibition/activation, pathway activation, target kinetics, receptor modelling).
• Assessment of various in vivo toxicological methods in Zebrafish eggs, larvae and adult fish (fixed-dose, repeated dosing, dose-escalation, subchronic & chronic toxicity testing, up-down toxicity testing, toxicokinetics, one/two-generation reproduction toxicity, neurotoxicity, developmental toxicity), in a variety of safety pharmacology observations (whole-body assessment, spinal cord curvature, behavioural & neurological assessment, motor activity, sensory/reflex responses, cardiovascular function, major organ size/morphology, hatching rate/efficiency) for various toxicological endpoints (LD50, NOAEL/LOAEL, BMD10, MTD).​
• Assessment of rodent (mice & rats) behavioural and locomotor analysis in a fully-controlled recordable environment (Multi-Conditioning System) using various paradigms in rodent modelling (open-field activity/locomotion, fear conditioning, active avoidance, passive avoidance, panic response, light/dark test, latent inhibition, learned helplessness, place preference).

Lab Equipment

---

---

---

---

---

---

---

---

---

---

---

---

---

---