Biochemist and pharmacologist Hakim Djaballah is head of Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center's High-Throughput Screening Core Facility.

Since opening its doors in 2004, the High-Throughput Screening (HTS) Core Facility has run millions of tiny experiments. Center investigators use the HTS facility to screen a chemical library of 300,000 potential anticancer compounds against targets such as cancer cells or the proteins inside them in an effort to discover novel drug candidates. At Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, special attention is paid to rare cancers. Tissue derived directly from patients is used to test different possible therapies.

In June, the facility and its head, biochemist and pharmacologist Hakim Djaballah, won the 2007 Robots and Vision User Recognition Award. Sponsored by the Robotic Industries Association and the Automated Imaging Association, the award is presented every two years to institutions that have successfully implemented robots in their work.

"The HTS facility has given Memorial Sloan-Kettering an important new tool to find agents that will help us understand how cancer cells work and lead us to novel anticancer drugs," said David A. Scheinberg, Chair of Sloan-Kettering Institute's Molecular Pharmacology and Chemistry Program.

"We're proud that our peers in industry have recognized the high quality of our technology and scientific expertise in advancing the understanding of cancer biology and, in turn, helping to develop more-effective therapeutics," added Dr. Djaballah.