President's Message

BellBrook is undergoing a big change with the launch of the first two iuvo™ products and the Invasion Assay Service in 2010. The company has built its reputation on Transcreener®, a biochemical assay platform, and with iuvo we are introducing completely new way to perform cellular assays.

We launched the first Transcreener assay in 2005. More than forty million HTS wells later, it has become one of the most extensively validated methods for screening kinases, ATPases and other nucleotide dependent enzymes. This is partly because it is a very solid technology, and partly because we made it more accessible by licensing to other tools providers and contract screening companies. It has been a successful platform from a commercial standpoint as well, with steady growth in sales continuing through 2009, one of the worst years in recent history for drug discovery tools. We will continue to introduce enabling new Transcreener products and improvements to existing assays in the coming year.

Iuvo is totally different: cellular assays rather than biochemical, plastic devices instead of biological reagents, HCS-based detection instead of plate readers. It is also a broader and more fundamental platform than Transcreener, with a vast number of potential applications. Developing the platform has been an exciting and truly interdisciplinary challenge: designing the microconduit arrays, developing the microfabrication methods, validating cell growth and function, and optimizing imaging and analysis methods. We pursued development through the inevitable surprises and setbacks because we think that replicating in vivo conditions more closely in cellular assays will provide more predictive results. We realize this is still a hypothesis, and we will be relying largely up to our customers to test it. But we think it's a good bet. We welcome you to join us in making the transition to more representative cellular assays.

And as always, we thank our customers, collaborators and business partners for the energy, creativity, and scientific abilities that they contributed in helping us develop more effective tools for drug discovery.