PhD in Pharmaceutical Chemistry, University of Hamburg
412-383-5856
avogt@pitt.edu
Office: 4313 Hot Metal Labs Building, 700 Technology Drive
Lab Website
Research Summary
Dr. Vogt is a faculty member in the Department of Computational and Systems Biology, and a member of the Organ Pathobiology and Therapeutics Institute (OPTIn). His primary role in the OPTIn is to facilitate translation of outstanding basic discoveries into novel therapeutics and chemical probes in a disease-agnostic fashion. He provides advice and support on all aspects of the drug discovery process including target validation, assay development and high throughput screening, and seeks to guide new drug development applications to funding agencies. One of his current projects is on its way to repurpose an approved drug to a clinical trial in a devastating childhood disease.
To achieve these objectives, he maintains a high-throughput screening facility within the OPTIn, with an emphasis on high-content screening (HCS) for phenotypic assays. He is an early adopter of HCS, and one of his current research interests is the expansion of HCS into multicellular organisms. It is becoming increasingly clear that better models of the in vivo milieu are needed to improve the discovery of new drug candidates. Zebrafish, C. elegans, and Drosophila in particular provide unique opportunities to discover novel potential therapeutics using functional assays in a living animal as a complement to cellular and tissue model approaches. Together with members in the Departments of Pharmacology, Developmental Biology, the Pittsburgh Institute for Neurodegenerative Diseases (PIND), and the School of Public Health he has established methodology for zebrafish and organoid chemical screening, generated automated image analysis tools for quantification of reporter gene expression, and helped automated neurobehavioral assays in multiwell plate formats. Since a major challenge in phenotypic screening is the fact that target(s) and mechanism of action (MOA) are not known, he is also interested in target identification and elucidating MOA of novel experimental therapeutics. Current discovery projects include cancer, immunology, metabolic, and neurodegenerative diseases. Dr. Vogt is a member of the Editorial Board for SLAS Discovery.