High-throughput analysis of behavior for drug discovery

Drug testing with traditional behavioral assays constitutes a major bottleneck in the development of novel therapies. PsychoGenics developed three comprehensive high-throughput systems, SmartCube®, NeuroCube® and PhenoCube® systems, to increase the efficiency of the drug screening and phenotyping in rodents. These three systems capture different domains of behavior, namely, cognitive, motor, circadian, social, anxiety-like, gait and others, using custom-built computer vision software and machine learning algorithms for analysis. This review exemplifies the use of the three systems and explains how they can advance drug screening with their applications to phenotyping of disease models, drug screening, selection of lead candidates, behavior-driven lead optimization, and drug repurposing.