BioTek Instruments and Enzo Biochem Life Science Unit Form Strategic Collaboration to Provide Innovative System for the Study of Live Cells

BioTek Instruments and Enzo Life Sciences have announced a co-marketing partnership withinvolving powerful, integrated solutions for high throughput live cell analysis. This program combines Enzo's CELLestial™ Live Cell Assays and BioTek's Synergy™ Mx Monochromator-Based Multi-Mode Microplate Reader.

Aimed at research institutions, as well as biotechnology and pharmaceutical companies, this reagents-instrumentation collaboration creates a highly reproducible and reliable platform for live cell analysis, offering a cost effective alternative to dedicated microplate imaging-based systems, which often are too costly for investigators to implement.

The collaboration will be formally launched next month at MipTec 2009 in Basel, Switzerland with the presentation of the scientific poster, entitled “A cost-effective workflow for high-throughput screening of G-Protein-Coupled Receptors (GPCRs).” The poster details the use of Enzo’s new FluoForte™ Calcium Assay Kit for monitoring intracellular calcium mobilization with BioTek’s Synergy™ Mx Monochromator-based Multi-Mode Microplate Reader.

Drugs targeting GPCRs represent the core of modern medicine, accounting for the majority of the best-selling drugs and roughly 40% of all prescription pharmaceuticals on the market today. Using BioTek’s Precision™ XS Automated Sample Processor for all dispensing steps in conjunction with Enzo’s proprietary calcium indicator dye technology and Synergy Mx Microplate Reader provides a small-scale, cost effective, automated cell-based screening approach for identifying GPCR agonists and antagonists. The described assay workflow provides low sample-to-sample variability and excellent assay performance in a miniaturized format.

“Through this collaboration, researchers will be able to obtain integrated instrumentation and reagent solutions that are high-performance, yet affordable,“ said Wayne Patton, PhD, Chief Scientific Officer for Enzo Life Sciences. “The collaboration will provide validated turn-key solutions to the research community."

“Previously, a major source of frustration for many researchers has been that selected assays were not compatible with a particular instrument and vice-versa,” said Peter Banks, PhD, Scientific Director for BioTek Instruments. "Our companies each provide key expertise and capabilities in the live-cell analysis arena bringing together BioTek's capabilities in microplate and dispensing technology that matches perfectly with Enzo’s cutting-edge live cell analysis reagents and kits."