"DiscoveRx Expands PathHunter™ Portfolio with Release of Homogeneous Mitotic Index Assays"

DiscoveRx Corporation today announced the release of two novel cell based assays, their latest additions to the expanding family of PathHunter™ products. PathHunter Mitotic Index assays are ready to use cellular assays that utilize DiscoveRx EFC biosensor technology to advance cancer therapeutic screening in a whole cell context, without the use of expensive imaging workstations. PathHunter assays provide a simple and convenient homogeneous assay with chemiluminescence signal generation, designed with optimal precision and performance for high quality automated screening.

Like other PathHunter technologies, the Mitotic Index assays are engineered biosensor cell lines with separate nuclear and cytoplasmic fragments of Beta-galactosidase. Complementation of the separate fragments occurs during the disassembly of the nuclear membrane at mitosis, enabling simple yet informative assays for screening or pathway profiling.

"The launch of our PathHunter Mitotic Index assays is a major step toward attaining simple, powerful, yet generic cell based assays that accelerate the drug discovery process,” said Pyare Khanna, CEO of Discoverx Corp. “These assays provide an innovative class of signaling assays that allow simple screening of either RNAi or compound libraries to identify cell cycle inhibitors”.

The PathHunter™ cell based assay platform from DiscoveRx is a revolutionary screening technology that uses positional complementation in whole cells to study signaling events based on protein translocation, secretion, degradation and trafficking. Pathway analysis is critical to understanding how target proteins function in the context of the living cell, and can reveal important information about off-target effects, compound specificity, and cross-reactivity for drug or RNAi candidates. The PathHunter approach offers a number of advantages for analysis of protein function, as it requires no antibodies GFP, or imaging and there is no need to wait for expression of a reporter gene. In addition, these assays use chemiluminescence for signal detection, which provides a very robust enzymatically amplified signal, low background, minimal compound interference and excellent assay performance.

Founded in 2000, DiscoveRx is a privately held, venture-backed company headquartered in Fremont, California, with additional sales offices in Birmingham, England, Hannover, Germany and Paris, France. DiscoveRx pioneered the use of beta-galactosidase enzyme fragment complementation in biochemical assays for discovery research, and holds extensive intellectual property in this area. DiscoveRx is dedicated to the development and commercialization of innovative solutions to study GPCRs, Kinases and other major drug target classes, and our products have been adopted in pharmaceutical and biotech drug screening initiatives for years. For more information, visit the article webpage.