Editorial [Hot topic: Label-Free Detection Technologies (Guest Editor: John D. McCarter)]

The use of label-free detection technologies in the pharmaceutical and biotechnology industries continues to grow. In addition, the variety of different label-free detection technologies increases year after year, with many new technologies originally developed both in academic and commercial laboratories now reaching the marketplace. The pharmaceutical and biotechnology sectors, particularly high throughput screening and lead discovery organizations charged with discovering, validating, and developing new drug leads ever more efficiently, are major users and integrators of such technologies. Future innovation in label-free detection technologies should continue to be fueled in part by partnerships with pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies, as well as by environmental and defense applications. At present most large and small pharmaceutical laboratories employ some type of label-free assay technology at one or more stages of the drug discovery process. Label-free cell-based assays for primary screening and functional assays are increasingly popular. Label-free detection technologies are appealing in part because of their potential universality, enabling the quantification of ligand binding to proteins whose function may be unknown, the identification of inhibitors of protein-protein interactions, or the detection of functional events in cellular assays. In this special issue of Combinatorial Chemistry and High Throughput Screening the reader will encounter a sampling of labelfree detection technologies highlighting the variety of applications of such methods in drug discovery, ranging from highthroughput screening to hit validation and lead optimization, as well as the characterization of antigen-antibody, protein-nucleic acid, and protein-small molecule interactions. This issue contains a number of exciting contributions from authors affiliated with research institutes, technology companies, or the biopharmaceutical industry.