Abstract

Why innovate? Why not just do research the way everyone else does? That would spoil the fun, right! More importantly, it may prevent those moments of discovery that would otherwise have been missed using traditional techniques. As an imaginative and innovative CRO we will demonstrate a number of approaches to drug discovery that we have implemented in our labs for our clients. These include JESS for PROTAC, Isolight for blood based cytokine assays and 3-D scaffold-based biology. JESS is a replacement for traditional Western blotting, allowing for accurate and reproducible measurement of target protein concentration in cell lysates when normalised to loading control proteins. We will demonstrate the use of this technology to generate dose-response curves for PROTAC’s, allowing reproducible rank orders of potency for compounds. Isolight allows the detection and measurement of secreted analytes from individual cells within a population, generating a “cytokine signature” for each treatment group. Cells can also be permeabilised within the instrument to measure intra-cellular proteins and resulting in a profile from individual cells, or deconvolution and measurement of many proteins within a small volume (5ul) of sample (e.g. serum). Finally, we will demonstrate an approach using electrospun scaffold material, used in regenerative medicine, to manufacture adherent cell cultures in 3-D that can be grown, manipulated and dispensed into well plates for compound profiling.