Cisbio Adopts BellBrook Lab’s Transcreener Platform for Enhanced Target Screening Services

BellBrook Labs, a leading provider of high throughput screening tools for the drug discovery industry, today announced that Cisbio, a global developer of HTRF^® (Homogeneous Time-Resolved Fluorescence) technology and services used in assay development and drug screening, is adopting BellBrook's Transcreener™ HTS Assay Platform as part of a technology licensing agreement.

Under terms of the agreement, BellBrook’s proprietary ADP immunodetection technology for kinases and other ATP-utilizing enzymes will be combined with Cisbio’s HTRF, a highly sensitive, robust technology for the detection of molecular interactions in vitro. HTRF is widely used for primary and secondary screening phases of drug development. The combined product will provide another detection option in addition to BellBrooks' fluorescence polarization and TR-FRET based Transcreener Kinase Assay products. It is expected to increase the likelihood that pharmaceutical companies will pursue higher risk targets that might not be fully validated. That, in turn, could lead to innovative new treatments for challenging diseases.

“We have gotten a tremendous response from the HTS commmunity since we introduced the concept of ADP immunodetection as a kinase assay method almost two years ago," said Bob Lowery, CEO of BellBrook Labs. "We've achieved enough traction in the market that now is the right time to increase market penetration through outlicensing. Cisbio's HTRF is an extremely robust detection module with extensive validation in the kinase space, so they were the perfect partner."

Introduced in 2005, BellBrook Labs’ Transcreener HTS Assay Platform enables seamless incorporation of hundreds of new drug targets into high throughput screening. The Transcreener platform relies on proprietary methods for immunodetection of the nucleotide products of group transfer enzymes, enabling entire families of enzymes to be screened using the same detection reagents.

Cisbio’s HTRF combines standard FRET (Fluorescence resonance energy transfer) technology with time-resolved measurement of fluorescence. During the FRET process, HTRF fluorophores emit long-lived fluorescence which can be discriminated from short-lived background fluorescence, boosting detection of these homogeneous assays.

“Since HTRF technology was validated on kinases for the first time over a decade ago, the kinase field has represented a proven area of excellence for Cisbio,” said François Degorce, head of HTRF marketing and business development at Cisbio. “Cisbio has developed a broad range of HTRF-based products that addresses kinase-related needs, and we are always interested in partnerships that complement our portfolio with reliable and robust technologies. BellBrook Labs’ Transcreener was exactly what we were looking for.”

For BellBrook, the licensing agreement provides validation for the Transcreener platform and ensures that, in a highly competitive fast moving HTS market, BellBrook’s technology is applied broadly to a diverse number of targets.

The new product will be available for purchase in January 2008 and will be sold through Cisbio’s sales networks in North America, Europe, Japan and India.