Our biologists thrive in an exciting drug discovery environment where they apply advanced tools and technologies to gain insight into the pathology of diseases.

Genomics: Affymetrix Gene Chip® probe arrays are used to understand gene function in the context of human disease and to identify new targets. We also use bioinformatics for efficient use of new scientific data and intelligent decision-making.

Compound Screening: The continued growth of compound libraries and the increasing number of targets available for screening have resulted in pressure to increase the throughput and decrease the cost and material consumption of screening. Part of our solution to address this was co-developing an ultra high throughput system with Carl Zeiss, Inc. of Germany. This system can screen more than 100,000 compounds per day and handle a variety of assay formats and readouts. We also utilize the surface plasmon resonance instruments for lower throughput “fragment” screens and a high speed, high throughput, confocal imaging system for cell-based high content screening.

Other tools that promote efficiency in high throughput screening include integrated robotic systems, automated pipetting stations and the Fluorometric Imaging Plate Reader (FLIPR).

Proteomics
Proteomic research at Roche Palo Alto involves high-resolution separation techniques along with mass spectrometry and informatics for studying the expression of the genome at the functional protein level.