Product News: Extending possibilities for cell-based HCS in drug discovery

At next month's SBS 2008 in St Louis, April 6-10, BIOSTATUS will be showcasing several new developments of its technologies for fluorescent imaging of cells. These are a direct result of the wide acceptance of its technologies into mainstream use for HCS in drug discovery.

DRAQ5™ for primary and genome-wide use:
New packaging formats for the far-red nuclear counterstain DRAQ5™ offer further economies in large-scale screening. These will be particularly suited to laboratories performing primary screening of compound libraries and genome-wide RNAi screens. Expect the same performance, simplicity and quality at improved cost per well.

DRAQ5™ proves a powerful tool for in vitro toxicology:
Presentations at recent HCS meetings have shown the fantastic added value of performing cell-based in vitro toxicology assays with DRAQ5™. Firstly, DRAQ5™ is the ideal choice of nuclear counterstain - the far-red emission means it leaves the visible range fully open for other parameters. From this, direct measurements on nuclear condensation, nuclear morphology, cell shape and size can be gathered. Exciting new data from scientists at Pfizer's laboratories in Cambridge, Mass. have shown that DRAQ5™ efficiently labels (phospho)lipid accumulation in the cytosol of primary human hepatocytes, one of the important early markers of hepatotoxicity.

Cell-based assays using non-adherent cells:
As we further develop our core technology CyGEL™ we want to know what it is that YOU want to do as a scientist leading the search for new druggable targets and compounds. CyGEL™ enables the imaging of LIVE non-adherent cells in HCS. This means that you can choose the right host cell type for a given biology and still get high resolution images since cells are gently held still in this thermo-reversible hydrogel. You can even recover the cells afterwards to investigate them in a further molecular analysis!

Come and see us at Booth 205 at SBS in St Louis!