SBS: new product round-up
include systems for high-throughput screening, genotyping and patch
clamping.
As the annual Society for Biomolecular Screening's annual meeting kicks off in Portland, USA, a number of new products have been introduced by companies specialising in drug discovery technologies. They include:
Cellomics, which has unveiled its ArrayScan VTI HCS Reader, a new-generation automated High Content Screening platform. The system has a modular design that allows researchers to expand its imaging capabilities through the addition of optional hardware, such as optical sectioning, to a flexible architecture that can handle parallel readers. It is designed for drug discovery and large-scale cell biology research using fluorescent cell-based assays.
Meanwhile, Cellomics has also launched three new BioApplication software modules - Kinetic Molecular Translocation, Morphology, and Cell Health Profiling - for its HCS Platform.
Sequenom introduced a bench-top version of its MassARRAY system, used for genotyping, targeted SNP discovery, allele frequency analysis, gene expression analysis and long-range haplotyping. The new version costs less than its peers in the same product range but can still handle up to 3,000 individual samples or 500 pooled samples per day, resulting in a throughput of up to 45,000 genotypes with multiplexing, or up to 375,000 samples with pooling.
Axon Instruments has started shipping its new PatchXpress 7000A high-throughput patch-clamp drug-screening platform to its first customers in the pharmaceutical, biotech, and safety-screening industries. The company claims that the machine is the world's first commercially available automated planar patch-clamp workstation for true, tight-seal whole-cell voltage clamp experiments. It clamps 16 mammalian cells at once, then synchronises drug delivery, electrical stimulation and data acquisition, so is ideal for screening drugs that act on ion channels.
PerkinElmer has introduced the FlashBlue GPCR range of scintillating beads for receptor-ligand binding studies, as well as a new LumiTrak Luminescence Cellular and Scintillation Imaging System that integrates liquid handling and plate delivery, that will provide researchers with a new option for G protein-coupled receptor screening.
Other products by PerkinElmer at the SBS exhibition include a MultiPROBE II PLUS Automated Liquid Handling System, a new version of its WinPREP software and two new integrated systems - the new Tandem Integrated Automated Liquid Handling System designed for multi-step assays and the new MultiPROBE II Assay Development Workstation, which integrates the firm's MultiPROBE II PLUS with microplate readers.
Vitra Bioscience is providing a preview of its new CellCard System and CellPlex Assays at the SBS meeting. The CellCard System is claimed to be the first open technology platform of its kind that enables researchers to run CellPlex Assays, or multiple cell types and markers simultaneously in a single assay well. The new system, in which cells are grown on CellCards, imaged, and analysed, allows scientists to generate comprehensive biological information earlier in the drug discovery process, according to the firm.
