BIOCIUS Life Sciences and BlueSky Biotech Extend Partnership, Provide Validated Enzymes

BIOCIUS Life Sciences Inc. and BlueSky Biotech are to collaborate to offer the industry’s only Sirtuin (SIRT, silent mating type information regulation homolog) enzyme preparations fully‐validated in a label‐free functional assay.

This collaboration builds on an existing partnership and will significantly improve drug discovery efficiency of the SIRT class of epigenetic modulating enzymes, which are being heavily investigated as promising therapeutics for several indications.

“Our latest endeavor with BIOCIUS provides researchers with a pre‐validated assay solution that saves time and money, and further demonstrates the synergy of our high quality proteins combined with BIOCIUS’s value‐added screening solutions ” said Paul Wengender, CEO, Blue Sky Biotech, Inc.

According to William LaMarr, Vice President of Research and Contract Services at BIOCIUS, “validation using a label‐free, functional assay is especially important for sirtuins given the controversy surrounding fluorescent based assays recently seen in the scientific literature.”

The collaboration intends to launch a selectivity panel of sirtuins and histone deacetylases (HDACs). The activity of the first release, SIRT1, has been linked to the regulation of multiple cellular processes including insulin signaling, apoptosis, and cancer, making SIRT1 an important therapeutic target for a variety of conditions. The two companies plan to release additional validated enzymes over the course of the coming months.