Emily Days, senior research analyst in the High-Throughput Screening facility, won the 2023 Rosalind Franklin Society Special Award in Science for remarkable contributions to the journal ASSAY and Drug Development Technologies.
The paper, Identification of Potent, Selective, and Peripherally Restricted Serotonin Receptor 2B Antagonists from a High-Throughput Screen, published in April 2023, described a high-throughput screen campaign that led to the identification of highly potent and selective 5-HT2B antagonists.
Days and her collaborators, including corresponding authors Aaron Bender, drug discovery scientist in the Warren Center for Neuroscience Drug Discovery, and David Merryman, Walters Family Professor and professor of biomedical engineering, pharmacology, medicine, and pediatrics, also identified two compounds with very limited potential for crossing the blood-brain barrier.
The RFS award is given to the best paper of the year by a woman or underrepresented minority in each of the Mary Ann Liebert, Inc. journals in health, medicine, and biotechnology.
The assay development and HTS team is a group of expert staff responsible for developing and automating biological assays and conducting biochemical and cell-based high-throughput screens to identify new lead compounds that benefit both mechanistic studies and drug discovery and development. Working closely with research investigators, the HTS team provides rapid, cost-effective assay development and chemical library screening. The team aids in instrument training/assistance, assay optimization, pilot screening, automation, data capture and analysis, compound distribution, full library screening, and screen validation. The HTS facility is part of the Vanderbilt Institute of Chemical Biology, which has some of the most comprehensive and state-of-the-art support core facilities in the nation.
The Rosalind Franklin Society recognizes and celebrates the contributions of outstanding women in the life sciences and affiliated disciplines, promotes broadened opportunities for women in the sciences, and through its many activities motivates new generations of women to this calling. The society honors the achievements of Rosalind Franklin (1920–1958), a British x-ray crystallographer whose extraordinary work, though largely overlooked and underappreciated at the time, was crucial to the discovery of DNA’s structure by James Watson and Francis Crick. The powerful symbolism of her remarkable story drives the society’s agenda.