Caliper Life Sciences, Inc. provides drug combination services through Caliper Discovery Alliances & Services (CDAS) to help researchers determine the efficacy of combination drug therapies and identify potentially harmful combinations before therapies enter clinical trials. Studies, performed in Caliper’s anti-cancer cell proliferation panel, cellular cytokine/chemokine release assays or using in vivo efficacy models, can help identify synergistic responses of drug combinations and eliminate antagonistic mixtures of drugs.

The simultaneous use of a variety of drugs is common today for the treatment of bacterial infections, HIV, hypertension, and cancer. Drug combination testing is subsequently a growing trend in many areas including oncology. If a combination is synergistic, lower doses can be used to achieve the same or better efficacy, which can lead to lower toxicity and safer patient care.

The CDAS drug combination studies combine the liquid-handling, automation and imaging elements of Caliper’s business. Drug combination studies can show whether chemical entities improve the efficacy of existing standard care treatments, providing a possible catalyst to FDA approval and market adoption. Testing combinations in vitro and in vivo also ensures that new clinical compounds will not decrease the effectiveness of standard therapy, thereby avoiding potentially harmful consequences for human study subjects. Drug combination studies also allow clinicians to better optimize the doses used in clinical trials as well.

Release date: December 3, 2007
Source: Caliper Life Sciences