Caliper Announces New Oncology Research Collaboration

Caliper Life Sciences, Inc., a leading provider of tools and services for drug discovery and life-sciences research, today announced that its Caliper Discovery Alliances and Services (CDAS) unit has formed a research collaboration with Denver-based Catholic Health Initiatives (CHI), one of the nation’s largest health systems.

The health care system’s Center for Translational Research (CTR), which is part of CHI’s Institute for Research and Innovation, will work with Caliper to develop improved methods for evaluating and predicting the efficacy of new cancer drugs. Under this program, CTR will provide fresh human tumor samples to CDAS for CDAS to perform biomarker and standard-of-care drug resistance/sensitivity studies on these samples. CDAS will grow the CTR samples under various experimental conditions, including traditional two-dimensional cell culture, three-dimensional (3-D) in vitro culture, and in vivo culture in mice, and the CTR will supply key treatment history and diagnostic data for these tumor sources.

The drug discovery industry demands better, more clinically relevant drug screening services utilizing cellular models that mimic the function of living tissues to reduce the drug candidate attrition rate between the stages of in vitro and in vivo experimentation. Optimized 3D cell assays or assays performed on human tumor cells maintained in a similar tumor microenvironment under the skin of mice, may provide valuable information to better predict drug efficacy in humans. CDAS provides oncology drug discovery assays based on a variety of biological output parameters such as proliferation, viability, apoptosis or specific biomarkers applied under conventional monolayer cell culture conditions.

More information on this research collaboration can be obtained from Caliper (booth #332) at the 102nd American Association for Cancer Research (AACR) Annual Meeting, April 2-6, 2011 in Orlando, Florida.