Target Discovery Core (TDC)

About the TDC Facility

The Target Discovery Core (TDC), supported by the Greehey Children’s Cancer Research Institute (Greehey CCRI), was founded in November 2016. The TDC has 1000 square feet of lab space within the state-of-the-art Barshop Institute building on the UTHSA Greehey Campus, which is sufficient to accommodate the proposed expansion of the TDC. The Barshop building is located within a 3-5-min walking distance to GCCRI, the South Texas Research Facility, and Mays Cancer Center (MCC), and a short 5-min shuttle ride (or a 20-min walk) to the UTHSA main campus, providing easy access for all cancer researchers at UTHSA. The TDC has a dedicated tissue culture room with all the necessary equipment and highly qualified personnel to fulfill all service requests expeditiously. The facility is equipped with a Vala Sciences IC200-KIC high-content imaging system, which is robotically integrated with a Liconic microplate incubator for live cell and fixed cell imaging. The BMG Labtech Pherastar FS multimode plate reader can accommodate any fluorescence or luminescence assay format.

For the rapid processing of screening plates, the LabCyte Echo acoustic dispensing system is used for plating library oligos and compounds into 96- and 384-well microplates. Reagents, buffers, and cells are dispensed using a Tecan Freedom EVO 150 and a Bio-Tek EL406 bulk dispenser. In addition, the TDC has the V4 human genome siRNA Library containing 64,752 siRNAs to cover 21,584 human genes and defined siRNA human subsets for pathway- and mechanism-based screenings. It has the following pooled and arrayed CRISPR libraries available: 1) pooled human CRISPR KO (Brunello) and inhibition and activation library (Calabrese P65-HSF); 2) human whole genome arrayed CRISPR gRNA library (Synthego); and 3) several human CRISPR KO sublibraries.

For pooled CRISPR screenings, the TDC collaborates with the CPRIT-supported Cancer Genome Sequencing and Computation Core (CGSCC) at GCCRI/UTHSA for next-generation sequencing and data storage and analysis.

Our Mission

The mission of the TDC is to provide investigators at UT Health San Antonio (UTHSA), as well as those from other research institutes in Texas, with state-of-the-art target identification and validation (TIV) technologies to promote fundamental research in cancer biology and accelerate cancer drug discovery.

Summary of Services

The services provided by the TDC aim to assist cancer researchers, including those who focus on pediatric cancers, to rapidly identify and validate new cancer targets to drive the development of novel cancer therapeutics via target deconvolution (i.e., using a known anticancer agent to find its target) and target discovery (i.e., discovering a target to develop new anticancer therapeutics). This is achieved by providing state-of-the-art technologies to investigators, Including genome-wide and cherry-picked gene RNAi screening, pooled CRISPR genome-wide knockout (KO) and activation screening, arrayed genome-wide and cherry-picked gene CRISPR knockout screening, gene editing and isogenic cell line generation, activity-based protein profiling (ABPP), and proximity labeling (PL).