Cyntellect's

Ed Machuga

Analysis and Purification of Living Cells in situ for High Throughput Biology

Cyntellect's platform technologies combine in situ high throughput single cell counting, of entire live cell populations, with laser based manipulation to enable rapid analysis and purification of diverse cell types directly in microplate-based formats.  These innovations are highly complementary to flow cytometry, particularly for adherent cells, and have been demonstrated effective for challenging cell types (rare cells, primary and sensitive cells, ES and iPS cells etc.).  This presentation will provide an overview of Cyntellect’s core technologies and highlight representative applications performed on the LEAP™ System and the new Celigo Cytometer including; stable cell line generation, automated purification of embryonic and induce pluropotent stem cells, high secreting cell line development, and in situ multi-parameter morphologic and functional analysis.

Velquest

John Helfrich, VP ePMC Lab Automation Programs is our Speaker.

“From Science to Compliance™”/Navigating the Regulatory Maze in Moving from Lab to Plant

Issues and Considerations for Biotech and Pharmaceutical Companies

Moving your  bio-pharma product from Discovery to IND thru to Production requires critical compliance choices at each step in the process.  In this workshop,” you will  learn  how compliance choices for life science companies guide the workflow management process. Good choices lead to intelligent tradeoffs in the capture and cataloging of intellectual property (IP), product development research, product quality characterization for clinical trials, and final product QC/QA record keeping for FDA compliant scaled production release. Where you are in your company life-cycle, whether you are an emerging new business or an innovative established business,  often constrains the cost/benefit and associated risk/reward tradeoffs in how you implement quality programs at each step in the product commercialization process. Learn the ins and outs of the regulatory maze so you can make the right compliance choice at the right time.

Perkin-Elmer

Steve Hurt, PhD Application Scientist

AlphaLISA^® Automation

Use of the JANUS Workstation to automate AlphaLISA assays, a no wash ELISA alternative technology

Immunoassay is a mainstay for the quantification of a variety of bio-molecular analytes in drug discovery, drug development, and life sciences research laboratories.  While ELISAs have traditionally been the most popular form of immunoassay, they are limited by the need to perform multiple wash steps. To overcome these ELISA limitations, PerkinElmer has introduced AlphaLISA^®, a novel, homogeneous immunoassay technology that eliminates wash steps.  Compared to ELISA assays, AlphaLISA assays generally have a wider dynamic range and at least comparable sensitivity. AlphaLISA assays also can be scaled up from 96-well to 384-well format with no need for re-optimization. Using PerkinElmer’s JANUS^® family of automated workstations AlphaLISA assays can be easily and reliably prepared, incubated, and analyzed without the need for complex and error-prone wash steps, time-consuming manual processing, or costly custom automation systems.  To demonstrate the performance of the JANUS workstation in automating AlphaLISA assays, four AlphaLISA cytokine assays (IL1β, TNFα, IL17, and IFNγ) were prepared.

High Res Bio

Ira Hoffman, Managing Director of HighRes Biosolutions

Cellario 2.5 New Features and Functionality

The new features and functionality included in the Cellario 2.5 Release. This is the 2nd major release of Cellario in 2009. This paradigm shift for frequent software updates provides the newest features and functionality without having to custom build Cellario for any given system. Some of the key features that will be demonstrated:

• Real Time Gantt Chart
• Decision Making/Branching Operations
• Critical Timings Displayed during Simulation
• Device Utilization Analysis and Plot

Labcyte

Joe Olechno, Ph.D.,VP Business Development

Moving Liquids with Sound: Acoustic Drop Ejection

The impact of acoustic liquid handling technologies on sample manipulation, particle formation, surface coating and more.

Acoustic droplet ejection (ADE) is now the state-of-the-art technology for liquid handling in high-throughput screening as well as secondary screening. This presentation will highlight how ADE delivers better results, cost savings and environmental technology for the HTS lab. The presentation will also cover recent advances in the transfer of oligonucleotides and fluids beyond DMSO.

Of special interest will be applications beyond traditional liquid transfer where ADE can be used for other applications. Examples of ADE outside of traditional liquid handling includes the formation of ultra-mono-dispersed particles, point-by-point coating of medical devices, fluid encapsulation, transfer of ultra-viscous fluids, array formation and biomedical imaging

DiscoverX

Elizabeth R. Quinn, PhD

EasyScreen™ -Arrestin GPCR Assays: Development of a Culture-Free, Single-Use GPCR Assay for Functional Receptor Screening

DiscoveRx now offers an extensive menu of over 150 human and ortholog GPCR assays based on the proven PathHunter™ -Arrestin technology which monitors the interaction of -Arrestin with activated GPCRs using -galactosidase (-gal) Enzyme Fragment Complementation. Until recently, these assays were only available as clonal cell lines. In this study, we describe the development of an innovative series of kits containing frozen cells over expressing the GPCR of interest, optimized cell culture medium and chemiluminescent detection reagents designed to provide the end user with access to the full menu of DiscoveRx cell lines in a convenient, assay-ready format. To develop the single-use EasyScreen format, PathHunter cell lines were first modified to prevent long-term propagation and expansion by treatment with a proprietary compound and then frozen in complete medium with no apparent change in morphology or cellular signal transduction. All assays were optimized in a 384-well format and cells were incubated in optimized culture medium for 24 hours prior to the assay. Our data demonstrates the utility of the kits for fast and simple confirmation screens that can be run in-house, potentially saving weeks of time in outsourcing the compounds to a second provider and waiting for results to be returned. Moreover, EasyScreen assays can be run in agonist, antagonist and allosteric modulator modes making the EasyScreen format the ideal way for customers to access GPCR functional assays in a cost and time effective manner for rapid and reliable small to medium screens on a variety of lead compounds, peptides or natural ligands without the lengthy and time consuming cell culture.

CisBio

Anna Sinsigalli,Scientific Consultant, New England Region

New Tag-lite Technology for Investigation of Cell Surface Receptors

Tag-lite is a new cellular platform for cell surface receptor study and drug screening. It is a homogeneous, non-radioactive and cost-effective alternative for the study of cell surface receptor dimerization and ligand binding, two important avenues in drug discovery research.

Tag-lite, developed by Cisbio Bioassays, combines two technologies, HTRF, highly sensitive, robust technology for the detection of molecular interactions in vitro, and SNAP-tag, Covalys Biosciences’ self-labeling protein tag system. Streamlined for highly sensitive assays, Tag-lite offers a comprehensive reagent and method selection for the investigation of G-protein coupled receptor (GPCR) binding and mechanistics, and preserves the funcutionality of the receptor and the intracellular signaling pathway.

This presentation will show several GPCR and ligand types, either small molecules or peptidic by nature, demonstrate that the activity of both assay partners remains unaffected by labeling procedure. Tag-lite can also be used for the study of the receptor homo and heterodimerization. The presentation also shows another use of HTRF in a HTplex assay for detection of IP1 and cAMP in a single well assay.

Agilent

Brian Sheldon

The Agilent Direct Drive Robot: A Next Generation Solution for Life Science Automation

TBA

Atoll / TECAN

Tim Schroeder

INNOVATIVE HIGH THROUGHPUT PROTEIN PURIFICATION IN 96-ARRAY FORMAT

A new platform technology has been developed which enables 96 array format column chromatography. The design allows the user to select any chromatographic material which is packed with due consideration to individual material compression requirements. Bed containment between two filter frits ensures high efficiency and peak symmetry similar to that of preparative and process separation columns, and distinguishes the system from the current filter based systems for simple on/off sample equilibration operation.

Quality packed MiniColumns allow high performance separations to be achieved with minimal use of mobile phase and extremely low sample volumes and mass.

Liquid flow in the columns (CV 50 to 600µl) was driven with positive displacement fluid transfer systems, thus mimicking the situation in columns individually connected to a one channel stand-alone chromatography system.  Fractions from step elution were collected into standard microplates, utilizing an automated microplate transport system and subsequently submitted to analysis in a UV plate reader or other analytical methods (ELISA, MS or HPLC).

The combined robotic system (Atoll MiniColumn and Tecan Freedom EVO) allowed to perform automated high throughput small scale bio-chromatographic separations of protein samples by running up to eight individual columns simultaneously.  Application examples shown, include protein separations by step gradient elution after binding the samples to affinity chromatography media, followed in a second dimension by de-salting under isocratic conditions.

These applications were successfully implemented in industry for parameter elucidation and optimization in process development of therapeutic protein production, in-process monitoring of fermentation broth for mAb-production and sample preparation for mass spectrometry analysis in antibody screening.  Furthermore it was applied in depletion of abundant components from CSF and blood plasma. The result was to establish fully automated, walk-away procedures with a significant reduction in processing time and increased process security.

Genetix

Hans Muller-Kahle, Dir. Of Business Development

Rapid selection of clonal high producing CHO and NSO cell lines for the production of biotherapeutic proteins

In this presentation we will describe an automated system that allows the screening of several thousand transfected clones in a few hours. The top producers for the target protein can then be picked and measured for stability and clonality. Data will be presented that shows that the top producing cell lines only appear in populations at a frequency of less than 1 in 1,000, and it is these that must be selected to achieve the highest levels of protein production.