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.
Cisbio Bioassays
Headquarters
Bagnols-sur-Cèze, France
Location(s)
Bagnols-sur-Cèze, France and Bedford, Mass.
Years in Drug Research
30 Years
Spokesperson
François Degorce, Head of Marketing
Web site
About the company
Cisbio Bioassays is a global developer of technologies that are used in assay development and drug screening procedures to enhance drug discovery. Cisbio pioneered the field of homogenous fluorescence methodologies via its proprietary technology, HTRF (homogenous time resolved fluorescence), a highly sensitive, robust technology for the detection of molecular interactions and widely used by the pharmaceutical industry for the high throughput screening stage of drug development. Cisbio’s technical platforms enable HTRF to be the technology of choice for GPCR and kinase screening. Key products include IP One Tb, based on HTRF Terbium technology, and HTRF Transcreener ADP.
The company’s line of business as it was 10 years ago. Changes in life science/drug research that influenced business.
In 1996 Cisbio introduced HTRF as an alternative to isotopic and non-high-throughput screening technologies.
At the time, there was a strong push towards HTS paradigms: screening a greater number of compounds in order to get better leads. Assays were designed with purified proteins. Cisbio combined biochemical assays with HTRF and, in 1999, introduced the first high throughput cell-based cAMP assay.
Since then, the use of cell materials to develop more relevant assays has generalized the cell-based approach. Other technologies have been launched since HTRF, expanding TR FRET as a homogeneous technology while FP is no longer viewed as a robust technology.
Scientific challenges in the next 10 years.
We foresee three major scientific challenges. The first will be developing more relevant assays and, again, cell-based and more physiological models would help minimize investigation of non-relevant targets.
The second challenge will be developing faster label-free technologies to speed up the high-throughput screening process. Many companies are already working in this area to provide an alternative to current methods.
Lastly, researchers are increasingly looking to study several parameters at the same time. While many technologies can simultaneously perform different measurements in a cell, the downside to this is that these measurements are not performed in a high throughput mode. The emergence of multiplexed functional assays, an area that Cisbio is currently focusing on, will meet this challenge.
Factor(s) that drove the development of technologies during the last 10 years and greatest area of growths.
The driving factors behind our R&D efforts have been the need for cell-based assays and an increased trend in outsourcing.
A strong push for more relevant screening results over the past 10 years has led us to associate HTRF technology to cell-based formats. We created new functional tools that can provide information about cell function in a high throughput mode and exceptional possibilities for miniaturization. We recently introduced a second generation HTRF technology based on a terbium cryptate.
One of the largest areas of growth has been providing services for pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies. Many do not have the resources or capabilities to design specific assays, and outsource specific elements of their research to partners, such as in the field of assay conversion to HTS-friendly formats. We developed a large range of assay development and custom labeling services for these companies that has become an integral part of our business.
Bold Prediction: Where will drug research technology be in 10 years?
In the future, we will see more qualified assays using natural models. These formats will need to satisfy both sensitivity and cell handling. The introduction of cells into screening processes implies that cell production and quality can be closely monitored.
We will also see better throughput for in-cell analyses to eliminate the bottlenecks caused by the large amount of data which these analyses generate.
