title: Advantages and application of label-free detection assays in drug screening.
abstract: BACKGROUND
  Adoption is accelerating for a new family of label-free optical biosensors incorporated into standard format microplates owing to their ability to enable highly sensitive detection of small molecules, proteins and cells for high-throughput drug discovery applications.
  
  
  OBJECTIVE
  Label-free approaches are displacing other detection technologies owing to their ability to provide simple assay procedures for hit finding/validation, accessing difficult target classes, screening the interaction of cells with drugs and analyzing the affinity of small molecule inhibitors to target proteins.
  
  
  METHODS
  This review describes several new drug discovery applications that are under development for microplate-based photonic crystal optical biosensors and the key issues that will drive adoption of the technology.
  
  
  CONCLUSIONS
  Microplate-based optical biosensors are enabling a variety of cell-based assays, inhibition assays, protein-protein binding assays and protein-small molecule binding assays to be performed with high-throughput and high sensitivity.
authors.affiliation: Associate Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Micro and Nanotechnology Laboratory, 208 North Wright Street, Urbana, IL 61801, USA +1 217 265 6291 ; +1 217 244 6375 ; bcunning@uiuc.edu.
authors.forename: Brian T
authors.initials: BT
authors.lastname: Cunningham
authors.forename: Lance G
authors.initials: LG
authors.lastname: Laing