Founded in July 2001, Adaptive Screening Ltd. (ASL) of Cambridge, UK, is developing several miniaturized drug-profiling platforms. "Advances in high-throughput technologies coupled with the 'genomics explosion' have transferred the bottlenecks in drug discovery from compound synthesis and target identification to hit-to-lead profiling and target validation," comments Tony Cass, professor of chemical biology at the Imperial College of Science, Technology and Medicine in London, and one of ASL's cofounders. "ASL draws on our expertise in biotechnology, instrumentation, microfluidics and software engineering to provide new tools and philosophies to overcome these impediments," he adds.
The company recently developed a novel, recombinant protein-based chip for identifying protein binding "signatures" in vitro.1 Candidate pharmaceutical compounds are passed over a prefabricated chip bearing an array of fluorescently labeled recombinant proteins, which, according to ASL, represent a significant number of the types of protein binding sites that pharmaceutical agents encounter in the human proteome....
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