SPT Labtech and BellBrook Labs have introduced a miniaturized high-throughput screening platform designed to support early-stage oncology drug discovery. The collaboration brings together automated liquid handling and fluorescence polarization assay chemistry to address challenges associated with screening Vacuolar protein sorting associated protein 4B (VPS4B) ATPase inhibitors.
VPS4B has emerged as a high-priority oncology target due to its overexpression in specific tumors and its synthetic-lethal relationship with its paralog, VPS4A. Despite this potential, scalable and reliable screening approaches have remained limited. The new platform targets this gap by enabling robust, resource-efficient screening workflows suitable for high-density formats.
The platform combines BellBrook Labs’ Transcreener® ADP2 fluorescence polarization assay with SPT Labtech’s dragonfly® discovery system. The Transcreener assay enables direct, homogeneous detection of ADP with high sensitivity, while the dragonfly discovery system delivers precise automated reagent dispensing. Together, the technologies support screening in both 384- and 1536-well formats, improve data quality compared with manual methods, and reduce reagent consumption and overall screening costs.
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High-throughput screening performed on the platform enabled the identification of 13 novel VPS4B inhibitors. Researchers can further evaluate these hits using SPT Labtech’s mosquito® liquid handling platform to support rapid follow-up testing and profiling.
Justin Brink, President of BellBrook Labs, highlighted the motivation behind the collaboration: “Our collaboration with SPT Labtech is a response to the industry’s need for smarter, more resource-efficient drug discovery. Through a combination of our Transcreener technology with the precision of the dragonfly discovery platform, we have significantly lowered the barriers to VPS4B screening, allowing researchers to dramatically reduce reagent consumption while maintaining the high Z′ values and data sensitivity required for reliable hit identification.”
Joby Jenkins, Chief Technology Officer at SPT Labtech, emphasized the role of miniaturization and automation in advancing screening workflows: “Building on 25 years of positive displacement technology, we are supporting our customers to achieve faster, more efficient liquid handling, laying the foundation for the next generation of laboratory automation. Our latest collaboration with BellBrook Labs demonstrates the power of combining industry-leading assay chemistry with world-class liquid handling.”
Data demonstrating the identification of 13 novel VPS4B inhibitors is being presented at SLAS 2026, held 7–11 February 2026 in Boston, Massachusetts (poster #1281-B). Both companies are also exhibiting at the event, with SPT Labtech at booth 616 and BellBrook Labs at booth 2808.
The collaboration reflects continued efforts to improve scalability, data quality, and cost efficiency in high-throughput screening workflows supporting oncology research.
This article is a rework of a press release issued by SPT Labtech.
