Burgeoning Competition in SPR Market

Courtesy of Applied Biosystems

For labs equipped to measure surface plasmon resonance (SPR), determining how biomolecules interact with each other is simple. Load a glass slide into the benchtop instrument, give it some tubes, click the mouse a few times, and voila! – out come affinity measurements, on-rates, off-rates, and dissociation constants, all in real time.

"We can absolutely determine affinity, concentration, and all other things," says Stefan Lofas, vice president and CSO of Uppsala, Sweden-based Biacore http://www.biacore.com, a leading manufacturer of SPR instruments. "But I think the kinetic aspect is the thing that customers are recognizing our type of system for." Receptor-ligand interactions, enzyme-substrate combinations, and drug-target binding are among the subjects of more than 3,000 peer-reviewed publications to Biacore's credit since introducing SPR to the biomedical community in 1990.

A few competitors have come and gone, Lofas points out, and a few smaller players worldwide are still on ...