Discussion

Imaging-based high-content assays have most recently advanced to become an integral part of rationale drug discovery and target identification. The current presentation discusses examples of cutting-edge, image-based assays developed in an effort to model complex neuropsychiatric disorders in a dish, making these accessible to the high-throughput profiling of drug candidates of novel and known mechanism-of-action. The presentation will address strengths of image-based methods applied to stem cell-derived neuronal cells, and the challenges inherent to the analysis of small morphological structures such as synapses.