DRAQ7™: Identifying Membrane-Compromised Cells in Cell Health Assays

One of the biggest cost in drug discovery and development has been failures of drug candidates late in the process (or after launch) due to unexpected or idiosyncratic toxicity, not to mention the risk to patient health. Recently, cell health assays have been developed that use physiologically relevant cells and measure their health under different doses of a compound using a few simple parameters. DRAQ7^TM has been validated for long-term, real-time, cell health assays and exhibits extremely low photo-bleaching. The use of DRAQ7^TM in the identification of membrane-compromised cells is described in this application note.