Since then, the company has updated the technology to handle 384-well plates as well as the original 96-well format, and in the latest development has produced a new version to cater for those companies that have switched to the newer 1536-well standard.
The new FLIPR Tetra is claimed to be the only microplate detection system on the market that has the fluid handling capabilities to cope with 1536-well microplates, which are becoming increasingly adopted by pharmaceutical companies with high-throughput screening programmes, as they significantly reduce screening time and reagent consumption.
The modular system also offers traditional 96- and 384-well fluidics, easily convertible by the user within minutes and uses an expanded set of excitation wavelengths, significantly broadening its use beyond traditional calcium mobilisation and membrane potential assays.
One of the reasons for FLIPR's success has been its suitability for studies of G protein-coupled receptor (GPCR) assays; GPCRs have become one of the most widely studied target groups in pharmacology, as drugs which modulate them have activity across a broad range of diseases.
For GPCRs, screening needs to take place in a cell-based format in order to extract the most meaningful biological result (since GPCRs are studded in the cell membrane and function physiologically in concert with a number of accessory proteins). Therefore, for each GPCR, ideally, a cell-based assay is required, and it is difficult and costly to build cell-based assays that are a true reflection of the in vivo situation.
Michael Biros, marketing director for drug discovery instruments at Molecular Devices, said: "With FLIPR Tetra, researchers can now increase the throughput and reduce the cost of their calcium mobilization and membrane potential assays even more - screening over 3,000 kinetic assays every six minutes using a few thousand cells per assay."