Biology at Work
President's Message
Thank you for visiting BellBrook Lab’s website. We are dedicated to delivering HTS assays that enable you to do things that were not previously possible, and to delivering a level of customer support that you may have thought was not possible. I'd like to take this opportunity to tell you about some of the exciting recent developments and some of the new things we will be focusing on in the coming year.
We initially developed the Transcreener concept – homogenous immunodetection of nucleotides as an enzyme assay method – for glycosyltransferases, a target class for which there were really no HTS options available. Most human and microbial glyscosyltransferases use UDP-activated sugars as donors, and the Transcreener UGT assay detects the invariant reaction product, UDP. Though acceptance by early adopters was rapid, UGT screening is a small niche, and it was difficult to make any meaningful conclusions on the general impact of the technology on HTS. Since the introduction of the Kinase Assay in late 2005, this picture has changed dramatically. The Kinase Assay has been extensively validated by many pharma and biotech customers in primary screens, selectivity profiling, and lead optimization. In the next year, some of this work will be published, providing the most important kind of validation possible.
We are excited about the prospects for the Transcreener KINASE TR-FRET Assay (detects ADP), which was introduced in late 2006 to extend detection options beyond the original Far Red FP Kinase assay. And with the introduction of the Transcreener PDE Assay in early 2007 – which relies on AMP (or GMP) detection – we'll be enabling screening of hundreds of additional enzymes that use adenine nucleotides as substrates or co-substrates. One of the most gratifying aspects of Transcreener assay development has been learning from our customers about how they are using our products to access previously intractable targets. Good examples of this are the use of the Transcreener KINASE Assay for screening carbohydrate kinases and carboxyltransferases. We're looking forward to seeing which AMP/GMP-producing targets our customers will pursue outside of the PDE family.
Good business sense dictates that we develop assays for established target classes such as protein kinases and PDEs, but we are also committed to leveraging the Transcreener Platform to enable the exploration of promising but largely unvalidated target families. For instance, we recently provided reagents for our as-yet-uncommercialized Sulfotransferase Assay (detects phosphoadenosine phosphate) to a major pharma interested in this family. Transcreener Assays for methyltransferases (S-adenosylhomocysteine) and acetyltransferases (Coenzyme-A) that are currently in development will enable the screening of many more enzymes in emerging target families. We are grateful to the NIH, including NCI, NIGMS, and NINDS for funding much of the R&D on assay development for these less validated families, as well as for the Transcreener KINASE Assay.
The Transcreener Platform has given us a strong revenue base and established our scientific credibility very quickly. But we are not resting on our laurels. Our cellular assay platform, which is centered on novel microdevices for cell culture called Micro Conduit Arrays, is nearing the point where we will be introducing alpha products for testing. The core of the technology was developed in the laboratory of Dr. Dave Beebe at the University of Wisconsin Department of Biomedical Engineering, and licensed exclusively by BellBrook's sister company Salus Discovery. By replacing wells with much smaller channels, the MCA has tremendous potential to expand the types of cellular analysis possible in an automated, ultra-miniaturized format. A key feature of the platform is the ability to incorporate three dimensional cell constructs in ECM to enable more accurate replication of in vivo signalling than is possible with cell monolayers. We'll keep you posted!