New clients for HTMS firm Biotrove
high-throughput screening (HTS) system, RapidFire Lead Discovery,
has been used to screen more than a million individual samples over
the last 12 months.
The programme has led to two new contracts - with a pharmaceutical major and large biotechnology company - said the company.
The use of mass spectrometry allows for label-free screening of challenging and intractable drug targets using native substrates, aid BioTrove. The company said its platform can analyse individual assays by mass spectrometry at throughputs of three to eight seconds per sample, providing a dramatic increase in throughput over conventional liquid chromatography-mass spectrometry systems.
Dr Can Ozbal, the manager of the RapidFire programme, said that this level of throughput made RapidFire a powerful tool to identify lead molecules against drug targets that are challenging to screen with existing technologies, for example those that lack good substrates - fluorogenic, spectrophotmotetric or radiolabels - to give a readout when a compound interacts with the target.
The premise behind the development of high-throughput MS is that it does away with the need for substrate labels or enzyme coupling. Many HTS targets fail to yield useful drug leads, either because an assay robust enough to be reliable at the high-throughput scale cannot be developed, or the poor performance of the assay fails to provide reliable 'hits'. And assay development, which may take months to years, can be a significant bottleneck in the drug discovery effort.
Pfizer, the world's number one drug company, has been working with Biotrove on high-throughput MS in drug screening for some time, and has been running its own HTMS system since the end of 2003.
The RapidFire system has already shown itself to be useful for screening drugs that intercat with enzymes such as kinases and phosphatases, and it is also being developed for tasks such as ADMET (absorption, distribution, metabolism, excretion and toxicology) testing - due this spring, as well as metabolic stability assays, compound library quality control and catalyst discovery.BioTrove offers access to the RapidFire Lead Discovery system as a high-throughput screening service that includes assay development, primary screening, as well as supporting secondary screening and chemistry programs.
Data supporting the capabilities of the RapidFire Lead Discovery system will be presented at the Screentech World Summit, held in San Diego next week.
