To mark its 10th anniversary, Drug Discovery & Development magazine invited industry vendors to reflect on the history and made predictions about future of the industry. Featured here are verbatim comments from this company.
Caliper Life Sciences
Headquarters
Hopkinton, Mass.
Location(s)
Hopkinton, Mass., Freemont, Calif.
Years in Drug Research
27 Years
Spokesperson
Nate Cosper, Director of Marketing
Web site
About the company
Caliper Life Sciences is a premier provider of cutting-edge technologies enabling researchers in the life sciences industry to create life-saving and enhancing medicines and diagnostic tests more quickly and efficiently. The company focuses on building a continuum of solutions designed to help customers effectively “bridge” the gaps that exist in bringing in vitro assays to in vivo results and ultimately into cures for human disease. Caliper's portfolio of offerings includes state-of-the-art, automated microfluidic systems and lab automation & liquid handling solutions that allow for high throughput laboratory experimentation; optical imaging technologies for real-time, in vivo research; and discovery & development outsourcing solutions.
The company’s line of business as it was 10 years ago. Changes in life science/drug research that influenced business.
Caliper, originally founded in 1981 as Zymark Corporation, began with a focus on providing customers with robotic platforms for high throughput drug screening and automation for other sample preparation workflows. In the late 1990’s it became apparent that the effectiveness of high throughput screening was constrained by false positive and false negative results, which caused researchers to miss potential new drugs. Realizing this need, Zymark sought out leading instrumentation that could provide higher quality experimental data, and ultimately combined with Caliper Life Sciences to offer complete solutions for assay setup and detection.
In 2005, the company responded to the biopharmaceutical industry’s emerging focus on outsourced contract research by acquiring NovaScreen. The following year, Caliper acquired Xenogen to better serve the industry’s need to bridge the gap between in vitro research and in vivo results to producer safer and more effective drugs, faster.
Scientific challenges in the next 10 years.
The biotechnology and pharmaceutical industries will begin to have an even greater thirst for products and services that provide for more efficient and successful drug discovery research to develop drugs that target smaller patient populations. This demand for “personalized medicine” will ensure that clinical trials rely on patient stratification and specialized compounds; Caliper must increasingly be engaged with all of the latest scientific research relating to personalized medicine to ensure that all products are aligned with industry demand.
Factor(s) that drove the development of technologies during the last 10 years and greatest area of growths.
Central to Caliper’s strategy is strong communication channels to life sciences researchers. Caliper works closely with scientists at all levels, from the bench to the executive suite, to ensure that our development priorities are aligned with the critical needs of the industry. The most critical factor that has driven the industry and our response has been the need to shorten and improve experimentation cycles. We have addressed this through several key process improvements, including:
- Making in vitro experimentation more predictive of in vivo and ultimately human outcomes;
- Decreasing false positives and negatives, resulting in higher fidelity data;
- Automating key workflows to provide results to researchers in real time so that they can better design the next iteration of experimentation; and
- Making best in class technology and science available through outsourcing channels.
Caliper believes that platforms that can shorten and improve experimentation cycles, lower end user costs, and shorten overall discovery timelines will be implemented by life sciences researchers and drive growth for the industry.
Bold Prediction: Where will drug research technology be in 10 years?
Drug discovery & development will occur in a bespoke fashion, which therapeutic regimens tailored for the specific biological profiles of individual patients. Combination therapeutics will be developed based on the protein expression profiles of patients, enabling safer, more effective treatment of disease. Genome sequencing will provide clinicians with exquisite data about a specific patient, ensuring a better overall disease management strategy. Life sciences instrumentation companies, such as Caliper, will respond to these needs by developing instrumentation that automates and simplifies critical workflows.
