Drug discovery for G protein-coupled receptors (GPCRs) stands at an interesting juncture. Screening programs are slowly moving away from model heterologous cell systems such as human embryonic kidney (HEK) 293 cells to more relevant cellular, tissue and whole animal platforms. Investigators are now developing analytical approaches as means to undertake different aspects of drug discovery by scaling into increasingly more relevant models all the way down to the single cell level. Such approaches include cellular, tissue slice and whole animal models where biosensors that track signaling events and receptor conformational profiles can be used. Here, we review aspects of biosensor-based imaging approaches that might be used in inducible pluripotent stem cell (iPSC) and organoid models, and focus on how such models must be characterized in order to apply them in drug screening.
Keywords: drug discovery; iPSCs; imaging; single cell approaches; stem cells.