Assay Development & Screening
We provide an extensive and unique range of assay development and screening services, which we will tailor to your requirements in hit identification and hit optimisation.
As part of our contract screening services we offer to run our clients protocols straight or assist in assay development. We will also optimise from assay development to High Throughput Screening (HTS). Our contract screening capabilities span the whole spectrum of hit generation, hit-to-lead and lead optimisation. We perform both cell-free and cell-based assays in major therapeutic areas such as inflammatory diseases, infectious disease and oncology.
A particular strength of our biology group lies in functional assays for inhibitors of peptidyl-prolyl cis/trans isomerases.
The screening service our biology group offers is unique in that our capabilities include the application of capillary electrophoresis as an efficient and effective screening tool. Whether applied to fragment-based screening (with our proprietary CEfrag™ platform), protein-protein interactions, enzymatic inhibition assays or natural products screening we offer to screen our clients’ compounds or libraries as well as our own fragment library.
Our Capabilities
- Assay development and screening across target classes including enzyme, protein-protein interactions, G-protein coupled receptors (GPCRs)
- Fragment screening using capillary electrophoresis (CEfragTM) – in addition we provide functional assay support for hit confirmation/hit-to-lead and lead optimisation
- Custom cell line generation using either customers’ cDNA or custom cloning of cDNA of interest*
- Protein production using either customers’ expression construct or custom design of expression construct.
*We are a registered Class II GM containment facility.
We work closely with our Medicinal Chemistry and ADME services to ensure delivery of high quality drug candidates to your challenging timelines.
Please contact us for further information. We will be pleased to arrange a teleconference or meeting with our technical experts.
As well as running a client’s existing assay protocol, we can develop, optimise and apply novel methodologies, tailored to our client’s needs
We have experience in a wide variety of available assay readouts, including UV/visual absorbance, fluorescence (fluorescence intensity, fluorescence polarisation, TR-FRET) and luminescence. Our chemists have proven success in developing our own fluorophores to fine-tune tool-ligand affinities for optimising our fluorescence-based assays.
Our Capabilities
Cell-free Assays
- Competitive binding assays
- Enzyme functional assays, including kinetic assays for PPIase inhibition
- Drug Discovery screening using Capillary electrophoresis including CEfrag (Fragment screening)
Cell-based Assays
We have assays established for several cell lines but assays can be customised using cell lines relevant to the customer’s requirements and therapeutic area of interest.
- Cell Viability (proliferation or toxicity)
- Cytokine Secretion assays
- Migration (96 well)
- Chemotaxis (96 well)