The CMBA: Member of the CHEMBIOFRANCE national infrastructure
The Center ok screening for BioActive Molecules (CMBA) of the BGE laboratory participates to the national infrastructure ChemBioFrance. This infrastructure was designed to encourage and stimulate exchanges and services at the interfaces between the chemistry of biology and chemoinformatics in order to select bioactive molecules that can be used for basic or therapeutic research purposes. ChemBioFrance is a distributed infrastructure that interconnects the French national chemical library, the platforms for the screening and the pharmacokinetic studies (ADME), and molecular modeling laboratories (chemoinformatics). It is open to researchers from academic and private laboratories.
Contact CEA/DRF/IRIG: Marie-Odile Fauvarque
More information.

The CMBA is also part of the GDR CNRS "ChemBio" which main objective is to interconnect together French researchers and teams working in the field of Chemical Biology all over the country.

The CMBA platform works in close collaboration with the DPM-Expert platform of the Department of Molecular Pharmacology (DPM) at Grenoble Alpes University, headed by Dr. Yung-Sing Wong. The DPM-Expert platform provides expertise in medicinal chemistry and collections of original chemicals, including extracts from alpine flora. Together, the two platforms constitute the Grenoble Alpes Drug Discovery (GAP2D) consortium, labeled by GIS-IBiSA pledge of open access and reliability for the acquisition, analysis and storage of data.

The CMBA pursues a triple objective:

• Facilities and collaborative activities of screening of chemicals libraries on cellular or biochemical assays by High Throughput Screening (HTS) and/or High Content Screening imaging (HCS), including statistical analysis of the results,
• A Research & Development activity for improving the analysis of cell phenotypes by HCS, including statistical analysis of results,
• A training activity on HTS and HCS.



The CMBA is widely open to the scientific community. Thus, since 2009, up to 30 screens were conducted with 25 different academic or private partners. All fields of application in biology, health, bioenergy and environment are concerned with already selected molecules for their potential in treating cancer, infectious diseases, or in the production of 3rd generation bio-fuel.
The CMBA helps scientists in assessing the feasibility of a screening project, assists in the miniaturization of the test and then proceeds to the pilot test for the screening of a library of chemical molecules (small or medium scale). The pilot screen provides proof of concept of the relevance of the biological testing, the statistical robustness and its adaptability to an automated platform. A larger screen is then performed.