Institut Pasteur Korea hosted a one week long hands-on laboratory course, training participants on the latest technology for the use of high content screening (HCS) in drug discovery. Trainees used automated high throughput imaging based platforms to screen chemical and RNA interference (RNAi) libraries in biologically relevant cell based systems. The course was entitled “High Content Assays for Target Discovery using RNAi Technology” and was held from May 11th to 15th, 2015 in Pangyo, Republic of Korea.
 
The course was made possible by the generous financial support from the Insitut Pasteur Paris, the Institut Pasteur International Network, and in-kind contribution from GE Korea Healthcare Life Sciences. The international faculty was composed of experts from France, Republic of Korea, Russia, United Kingdom, and USA. The curriculum included theoretical lectures covering topics from cell based assay development, liquid handling, assay automation, HCS, RNAi technologies, image mining to data analysis. The course also allowed trainees to get lab experience on setting up experiments for HCS. Among the 33 applicants, 20 trainees were selected to participate in this first international course; they were either graduate students, post-doctoral research fellows or principal investigators, from 14 different affiliations in 7 countries including China, Hong Kong, France, Republic of Korea, Tunisia, USA, and Vietnam. The trainees had comprehensive interactions with faculty, with some of them formalizing potential collaborative research projects.
 
Dr. Regis Grailhe, group leader of the technology development platform, and one of the course organizers commented that "Institut Pasteur Korea is proud to actively participate in the Republic of Korea sharing knowledge in the use of cutting edge technologies such as HCS and RNAi, well beyond current frontiers. Dr. Hyang Sook YOO, an international cooperation adviser from the Korea Research Institute of Bioscience and Biotechnology located in Daejeon, who also attended the course, urged future students to learn HCS and RNAi technologies that should become standard technologies in the future. Dr. Hakim Djaballah, CEO of Institut Pasteur Korea, added "this is a perfect example of a quantifiable tangible which some agencies in Korea are hoping to see from our institute's global performance; participating and supporting global standard research training in Korea is priceless". Institut Pasteur Korea recently celebrated its 10 year anniversary delivering on Dr. Louis Pasteur’s maxim "Science knows no country, because knowledge belongs to humanity".
 
Due to the success of this course and its over subscription from local interest, Insitut Pasteur Korea has decided to extend this experience by offering the course on a biannually basis with the hope and expectations to help train the next generation scientists on cutting edge technologies in Korea and beyond. The next call for the course will be announced in the near future.