HIGH-THROUGHPUT INSTITUTE FOR DISCOVERY (HIT-ID)

The new High-throughput Institute for Discovery (HIT-ID) established in the Perelman School of Medicine (PSOM) will be led by Dr. Sara Cherry, the Eckman Professor of Medical Sciences in the Department of Pathology and Laboratory Medicine.

The Institute, a joint effort of the Department of Pathology and Laboratory Medicine, the Department of Biochemistry and Biophysics, and the Department of Systems Pharmacology and Translational Therapeutics in partnership with PSOM will create an interdisciplinary program to integrate existing High-throughput screening with areas including computational and structural screening, pharmacology, and precision medicine.

HIT-ID will nucleate research groups interested in using diverse approaches toward initial stages of basic and therapeutic discovery across UPENN. We will support research in computer-aided discovery of ligand binding using computational approaches from molecular docking to deep learning including AI.  We will support the development of biochemical and cell-based screening efforts to validate candidates from computational approaches and to perform new discovery screening efforts. We will facilitate the initial stages of tool development, target de-risking and feeding the hit-to-lead pipeline. This includes support of diverse modalities for discovery from predictive to empirical, from basic to translational. This will ultimately promote science through target validation, pathway profiling and tool discovery.

HIT-ID seeks to strengthen the scientific community at Penn through investing in faculty recruitments, pilot grant programs to support screening and/or lead development, fostering collaborations and developing technologies and infrastructure to enhance screening capabilities on campus. We hope to expand our collective ability to identify new tools, confirm new targets, new chemotypes, and facilitate the development of pre-clinical agents. Furthermore, we hope to expand areas that bridge clinical and basic science including in precision oncology and more sophisticated organoid culture systems. We look forward to building in these areas of discovery research.