Collaboration for a high-throughput 3D cell screening solution

UPM Bio­med­icals is pleased to announce that it has entered into an agree­ment with PerkinElmer Health Sci­ences, Inc. under which the life sci­ences leader will serve as a dis­tri­b­u­tion part­ner for the GrowDex® and Grow­Dase™ prod­uct lines. This new col­lab­o­ra­tion will pro­vide researchers with a com­plete solu­tion for high-through­put screen­ing (HTS) of 3D cell cul­tures in ear­ly drug dis­cov­ery by bring­ing togeth­er PerkinElmer’s cell imag­ing and automa­tion solu­tions and exper­tise with UPM’s range of ani­mal-free 3D reagents and expertise.

Auto­mat­ed HTS is wide­ly used to eval­u­ate the ther­a­peu­tic poten­tial of hun­dreds of drug can­di­dates in par­al­lel, and the increas­ing preva­lence of 3D cell cul­ture has cre­at­ed a need for new high-qual­i­ty reagents suit­able for HTS appli­ca­tions such as can­cer drug screening.

The com­pa­ny’s GrowDex nanofib­ril­lar cel­lu­lose hydro­gels cre­ate an envi­ron­ment that more close­ly match­es con­di­tions in the human body and can be han­dled effec­tive­ly at room tem­per­a­ture, mak­ing them well-suit­ed for scale-up and automa­tion with­out com­pro­mis­ing per­for­mance. Com­bined with Grow­Dase — which enables effec­tive one-step recov­ery of cells for down­stream pro­cess­ing appli­ca­tions — this pro­vides an ide­al solu­tion for high-through­put 3D cell cul­ture appli­ca­tions, deliv­er­ing more repro­ducible and reli­able results and help­ing to pre­dict drug action in vivo.

The Opera Phenix® Plus auto­mat­ed high-con­tent screen­ing sys­tem is the ide­al com­ple­ment to GrowDex hydro­gels, and this com­bined solu­tion has already been suc­cess­ful­ly used in a num­ber of notable research projects, includ­ing auto­mat­ed test­ing of patient cell sen­si­tiv­i­ty and resis­tance to drugs for per­son­al­ized can­cer treat­ment research.

“This solu­tion brings togeth­er the instru­ment, soft­ware and cell cul­ture matri­ces to make life eas­i­er for researchers and ensure a high lev­el of con­sis­ten­cy between exper­i­ments. It will be excit­ing to see how this col­lab­o­ra­tion will help dri­ve research and accel­er­ate the drug devel­op­ment process. Togeth­er with PerkinElmer, we have ensured that the prod­ucts are avail­able for imme­di­ate delivery.”

- Johana Kun­co­va-Kallio, Director

Alan Fletch­er, senior vice pres­i­dent of life sci­ence at PerkinElmer, added, “Estab­lish­ing the phys­i­o­log­i­cal rel­e­vance of poten­tial ther­a­peu­tic approach­es ear­li­er in the research cycle is crit­i­cal to advanc­ing drug dis­cov­ery and reduc­ing clin­i­cal tri­al fail­ure rates. By work­ing togeth­er to offer its inno­v­a­tive 3D cell reagents, we are able to expand our range of 3D cell cul­ture mod­els and help researchers more quick­ly gain the crit­i­cal insights they need to dis­cov­er suc­cess­ful drug candidates.”