GE looks to speed drug discovery with new high capacity system

19-Jun-2018 - Last updated on 19-Jun-2018 at 19:30 GMT

(Image: Getty/YiuCheung)

GE has introduced a new high capacity system designed to improve productivity in the increasingly complex drug discovery process.

“The drug discovery process is growing in difficulty and length presenting challenges to leaders of drug discovery programs,” said Christina Burtsoff-Asp, GE Healthcare Life Sciences global product marketing manager for label-free technologies.

“With escalating cost pressures and increasingly complex disease targets, improving productivity in early drug discovery has been a challenge,” she told us.

In response, GE Healthcare Life Sciences has launched the Biacore 8K+, which, with up to 12 microplates, provides eight times higher throughput than a single-needle system, explained Burtsoff-Asp.

According to the company, the new system can automate more than 4,500 drug candidate/disease target binding experiments in a single run. Burtsoff-Asp said the system also can be paired with GE’s Biacore Insight Evaluation Software to evaluate screening and characterization data.

“The use of SPR as a bio-analytical tool has expanded in recent years to cover process optimization and quality control applications as well as early stage drug discovery,” said Burtsoff-Asp.

“SPR can support reliable analysis of critical quality attributes and is considered a novel analytical tool for drug product comparability testing.”