DOI
https://doi.org/10.3389/fphar.2021.722889
Abstract
The solute carrier (SLC) superfamily represents the biggest family of transporters with important roles in health and disease. Despite being attractive and druggable targets, the majority of SLCs remains understudied. One major hurdle in research on SLCs is the lack of tools, such as cell-based assays to investigate their biological role and for drug discovery. Another challenge is the disperse and anecdotal information on assay strategies that are suitable for SLCs. This review provides a comprehensive overview of state-of-the-art cellular assay technologies for SLC research and discusses relevant SLC characteristics enabling the choice of an optimal assay technology. The Innovative Medicines Initiative consortium RESOLUTE intends to accelerate research on SLCs by providing the scientific community with high-quality reagents, assay technologies and data sets, and to ultimately unlock SLCs for drug discovery.
Funding
This work is part of the RESOLUTE project that has received funding from the Innovative Medicines Initiative 2 Joint Undertaking under Grant Agreement No. 777372. This Joint Undertaking receives support from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme and EFPIA. In addition, we acknowledge support by the Austrian Academy of Sciences, the Vienna Science and Technology Fund (WWTF, Grant No. LS17-051), Austrian Science Fund (FWF, Grant No. W1232), Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council (BBSRC, Grant No. BB/P009042/1), Novo Nordisk Foundation (grant NNF20CC0035580), National Institutes of Health (NIH, Grant No. R01 GM108911), Bayer AG, Vifor Pharma, Sanofi and Pfizer Inc. The funders were not involved in the study design, collection, analysis, interpretation of data, the writing of this article or the decision to submit it for publication. All authors declare no other competing interests.
Copyright
© 2021 Dvorak, Wiedmer, Ingles-Prieto, Altermatt, Batoulis, Bärenz, Bender, Digles, Dürrenberger, Heitman, IJzerman, Kell, Kickinger, Körzö, Leippe, Licher, Manolova, Rizzetto, Sassone, Scarabottolo, Schlessinger, Schneider, Sijben, Steck, Sundström, Tremolada, Wilhelm, Wright Muelas, Zindel, Steppan and Superti-Furga. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) and the copyright owner(s) are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
