Cisbio has entered into a partnership agreement with Lumiphore to gain access to new fluorescence reporter molecules for use in its high throughput (HT) screening assays.
The agreement grants Cisbio exclusive access to the Lumi4 compounds for fluorescence applications in drug discovery, with Lumiphore free to develop partnerships to develop the technology in other areas.
Cisbio has played an important part in the development of HT drug screening technologies and has enabled researchers to conduct binding assays based on its homogenous time-resolved fluorescence (HTRF) system that combines Time-Resolved Fluorescence (TRF) and Fluorescence Resonance Energy Transfer (FRET).
“This agreement reinforces our position as real leaders the TR-FRET field, and is a very important step for us,” said François Degorce, head HTRF marketing and business development at Cisbio.
“We have plans to apply the technology in some of our current products as well as many of our mid-to-long term projects.”
Lumiphore’s lanthanide-based florescent reporter molecules will enable Cisbio to generate assays that provide more accurate results due to their long-emission lifetimes and strong luminescent properties that provide higher signal-to-noise (S/N) ratio.
“According the last figures I have, TR-FRET accounted for between 13 and 15 per cent of the HT screening market and the use of this technology is increasing rapidly compared with other competing technologies due to its increased sensitivity and robustness,” said Degorce.
During the TR-FRET process, fluorescent reporting molecules emit long-lived fluorescence signals when a fluorescence donor molecule binds to an acceptor / emitter molecule.
This is in contrast to many biological assay systems that use radioactive reagents, which pose health risks not just to the researchers themselves, but also to any live cell lines they may be conducting assays in.
The donor / acceptor molecules and proteins can be supplied from the company’s catalogue, or can be developed in-house or by Cisbio to enable researchers to study the binding of potential drug candidates.
This powerful new technology brings researchers increased assay sensitivity, higher throughput and greater reliability and flexibility than some other systems with Cisbio already providing a wide range of assays based on its original Europium cryptate technology.
These include assays for GPCRs (G Protein couple receptors), inflammation, metabolic diseases, central nervous system, biomarkers, kinase assays and other oncology related assays.
“The new technology will complement our existing catalogue offerings and quite a few of our existing assays will be upgraded to make use of it,” said Degorce.
In addition, the company also offer kits for monitoring bioprocesses such as protein or antibody engineering as well as enabling rapid quantification of antibodies during the production process.
“The Lumiphore technology is very bright and very stable, and will enable an upgraded version of the HTRF assays to be conducted on a expanded range of detection platforms,” said Degorce.
He continued by saying that because the Lumiphore technology uses a Terbium ion rather than the Europium ion that Cisbio currently uses a whole range of new possibilities could be accessed.
This could include the development of multicolour assays that use different donor-acceptor pairs that have very narrow excitation and emission bands.
The compounds resistance to bleaching allows samples to be archived allowing improved quality control comparisons between old and new data - a problem for more easily bleached organic dyes.
“When you run a screen with 100,000 samples and the detector system is not working properly, instead of throwing the plate away and having to start again because the lifetime of the dyes are too short lived to conduct the experiments the next day, you can store the plates in the fridge or freezer and study the plates the next week when the detector is back up and running,” said Degorce.
“Many luminescence screens actually destroy the reporter molecules such that any repeat read-outs are less sensitive than the first, with both our old Europium cryptate dye and this new Lumiphore technology you can just keep on reading the plates.”
