Toxicology applications

Aclara BioSciences, a US company involved in tools for drug discovery, this week introduced new toxicology applications that expand the capabilities of the eTag Assay System.

Toxicogenomic and toxicoproteomic applications address a need in pharmaceutical drug development to determine, as early in the drug development process as possible, which drugs will fail because of toxicity issues. The company claims that by using the eTag Assay System, researchers will be able to perform preclinical toxicogenomic and toxicoproteomic studies allowing early identification of toxicity.

Introducing the applications at the Society of Toxicology 42nd Annual Meeting in Salt Lake City, Utah this week, ACLARA scientists presented results of a study which used novel eTag gene and protein assays to analyse hepatic Cytochrome P450 induction by a model compound.

"It is necessary to identify potential toxicology issues as early in the drug development process as possible so that questionable candidates can be removed from the development pipeline and vital resources are used to develop the most promising leads,"​ said Dr. Sharat Singh, Aclara's senior vice president of eTag Assay Technologies.

The company claims that the new eTag toxicology applications enable simultaneous profiling of toxicity genes, proteins and implicated signaling pathways directly from cell lysates derived from tissue or rat and human hepatocytes.

The Assay System - that uses Aclara's proprietary eTag reporters to multiplex the analysis of genes and/or proteins from the same sample - is a high throughput system for the study of 10s to 100s of genes, proteins and cell-based antigens across thousands of samples. The system makes it possible for researchers to adopt a systems biology approach towards studies of gene expression, protein expression, and for applications such as cell signaling and pathway activation, protein-protein interaction and cell receptor binding.