Dr. Chris Penton is currently Head of High Throughput Screening and Assay Development at the ACDD. Chris has more than eight years of industry drug discovery experience at Sanofi, Icagen, and Recursion.

One of Chris’s favorite projects involved designing and establishing a high-throughput cellular assay for a two million compound screen at Icagen in Oro Valley, AZ. This novel screen used a hybrid enhancer and promoter-regulating full-length gene reporter on a premature termination codon target. As a result of the project, Chris developed more than twenty-five cell lines using Transposon and Lentiviral systems. Chris also designed and developed multiple reporter assays using the NanoBiT system, the HiBiT system, NanoLuc and other luciferases. At Recursion, Chris used 1536-well automated Cell Painting for high-content imaging. He loves transfections and also helped optimize 1536-well CRISPR guide RNA transfection protocols to increase performance and efficiency.

He enjoys the fast pace of drug discovery, the inherent nuances, and the challenges of combining multiple systems to capture as much biology and data as possible from each assay.

Dr. Matthew Kaplan, Manager of the University of Arizona Functional Genomics Core, has worked in high-throughput biology for over 20 years. Over that time Matt has been continuously working as a developer on Beckman Coulter liquid handling systems and specializes in writing custom automation pipelines with a focus on project optimization and scalability. Matt has worked on a variety of projects, ranging from DNA testing for National Geographic’s Genographic Project to yeast deletion library screening to high-throughput COVID-19 testing. Matt designed, optimized, and performed all of the genotyping for the public DNA testing for National Geographic’s Genographic Project. This work included the continuous expansion of the genotyping loci and screening platforms, as well as scaling testing from 36 samples a month to 5,000 samples per week. Matt worked closely with a U of A  research group to optimize and conduct genome-wide yeast deletion library screen, including automated high-throughput yeast inoculation, growth, chemical stimulus addition, RNA isolation, and Real-Time PCR assays of multiple loci. During the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic, Matt developed, optimized, and constructed the automation pipelines for the University of Arizona's statewide COVID-19 Antibody testing. This FDA-approved testing pipeline had taken samples from 31 sites across the state of Arizona including all 15 counties, and could test 5,000 individuals per day. Matt also developed and optimized all University of Arizona high-throughput COVID-19 PCR testing to enable the return of faculty and students to in-person classes.