EMD reagents for TAP's protein system
The Automation Partnership that will see EMD's products included on
the new Piccolo system for recombinant protein production.
Piccolo was launched earlier this year and is designed to allow research groups to go into full protein production much earlier and to progress experiments faster. The system automates the process of cell culture, protein expression, cell lysis and purification.
The earlier availability of pure protein should allow more thorough evaluation of compounds and help prevent compounds failing once expensive trials are underway. Clinical attrition rates are greatest in Phase II trials, where more than half of all investigated compounds fail.
The two companies will develop reagents EMD's Novagen-brand cell culture, lysis, and affinity purification reagents for Piccolo.
Richard Wales, TAP's director of business development, told DrugResearcher.com that the two companies are currently working on test runs and reagent stability trials to make sure that the reagents work well on the Piccolo platform. He added that the addition of these 'optimised consumables' to the product platform "will help scientists produce specific proteins in days, rather than months."
And having more time to study their proteins will enable better defined compounds to advance into preclinical research and could be a significant factor in greatly reducing clinical phase compound attrition rates through earlier decision-making.
Piccolo was first introduced to the industry in January and is still in the latter stages of development. It was designed alongside a consortium of three (as yet unnamed) pharmaceutical companies, and the first of these should take delivery of a Piccolo in October or November of this year. The remaining two companies will receive their systems early next year, said Dr Wales.
"The combination of our reagents and the Piccolo system creates a powerful platform that will allow drug discovery researchers to streamline the painstaking process of protein expression optimisation and, thus, enable them to more rapidly screen and identify medically relevant proteins,", said EMD's director of business development Tom Foti.
EMD operates as Merck Biosciences in Europe.
