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.
Fluxion Biosciences
Headquarters
South San Francisco, Calif.
Years in Drug Research
3 Years
Spokesperson
Jeff Jensen, CEO
Web site
About the company
Fluxion Biosciences provides cellular analysis tools for use in critical life science research and drug discovery applications. Fluxion’s proprietary CellFlux microfluidic platform enables precise functional analysis of individual cells in a multiplexed format. Products include the BioFlux system for high-content cell imaging and cell-cell interactions, and the IonFlux system for high throughput ion channel screening. Fluxion’s systems meet the rigorous demands of life science and drug discovery scientists by providing an intuitive, high throughput operating system for single-cell biology.
The company’s line of business as it was 10 years ago. Changes in life science/drug research that influenced business.
We are an emerging, 3-year old company that was formed based on some of the recent scientific advances driving the industry
Scientific challenges in the next 10 years.
Right now many cellular assays, such as automated ion channel electrophysiology, have costs per data point of several dollars. Also, in many cases the throughput isn’t sufficient to enable use in primary screening. This limits their use to secondary screening and lead optimization and other similar limited-sample-set applications. The major challenge we see is the ability to scale up these assays to acceptable throughput while simultaneously lowering the cost per data point to less than $0.30. The use of emerging microfluidics approaches such as Fluxion’s aim to deliver on this goal.
Factor(s) that drove the development of technologies during the last 10 years and greatest area of growths.
The primary factor driving our technology development has been the desire for screening tools that have a greater biological relevance than traditional biochemical primary screens but maintain the desired low cost and high throughput. We have met this need by developing a range of high throughput live-cell assays. We continue to see functional cellular assays as an important growth area going forward. Stem cell developments offer the potential to culture a range of cells with the same functionality as primary human cells. This will initially impact ADME/Tox, but ultimately will affect all areas of pre-clinical development.
Bold Prediction: Where will drug research technology be in 10 years?
Biochemical assays will fade away. All screening and pre-clinical development will be done using cells derived from human stem cells. Clinical trial patient segmentation will require that early screening tools are adopted for patient stratification, and these tools ultimately become diagnostics in the clinic. Drugs requiring a companion diagnostic become the norm.
