Has Indigo Biosciences figured out how to shrink the long lead-times and large costs of drug discovery by delivering inside a freezer one of the pharmaceutical industry’s most important tests for new compounds? 2009 could be the year in which the answer becomes clear for the State College biotech startup.
The company marks this first week of January with delivery to initial customers of its unique, single-use, frozen nuclear-receptor assay kits. That was just a day or two before the Ben Franklin Partnerships of Central and Northern Pennsylvania announced an investment of $200,000 in the company, and only two weeks after the Life Sciences Greenhouse of Central and Northern Pennsylvania provided $250,000 to support Indigo’s move of its patented technology into the market. Those results capped a year-long period of beta testing.
What lies ahead for the rest of a 2009 that has gotten off to such a great start?
“It should be very interesting,” CEO H. Dean Bunnell says. “If the market response is anything like the beta test response, the product should be very well received.”
Bunnell also forecasts up to 10 new staff positions for production and marketing and a doubling of company space for manufacturing the test kits.
The individual kits offer researchers a mammalian cell that contains a robust human protein, which is the nuclear receptor where the active ingredients of drugs and biological agents create a therapeutic–or other cellular–change inside the body. To discover a new drug, researchers seeking a particular cellular effect may test 100,000 potential molecules on a single receptor, an enterprise that has traditionally required pharmaceutical laboratories to maintain vast collections of cell cultures and technical staff.
Indigo Biosciences has developed a large suite of the most important human receptors, which it plants individually inside the cells of other mammals and delivers to customers ready for testing in tubes for pouring or trays that hold cells in 96 or 384 individual wells. The cells are also engineered to give a bio-luminescent response that signals the strength of the effect of a tested agent on the protein receptor.
The necessary quantities of Indigo Biosciences kits are delivered to a testing lab any where in the world in a cryogenic freezer within 24 hours. The resident lab tech thaws kits as needed and adds nutrient solution. The tech then adds the drug agent of interest to the solution, measures the result under a lumen-meter, records the data, throws away the used kit, and tests the next molecule of interest.
Source: Indigo Biosciences, H. Dean Bunnell
Writer: Joseph Plummer
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