Genetic modification and screening services

SCS has proprietary, specific cell identification and purification technologies valuable for generating pure populations of stem cells and their progeny for use in drug discovery:

• target identification and validation – our strength is to provide stem cells of great diversity that are physiologically relevant and that can be produced at scale

• assay development –  our capability to  miniaturise stem cell-based assays enhances the utility of the cells and we provide know-how on exploiting their intrinsic biology to design novel assays, such as those required for regenerative medicine

• HTS screeening  – at maximum throughput we can screen some 40,000 compounds per week

• lead optimisation – an early SCS project was to provide the pharma industry with a reliable, Alzheimer’s disease assay based on mouse ES cells for medicinal chemistry to optimise their leads without affecting the productivity of the assay

• ADMETox - we enable testing on pharmacology relevent cells at earlier stages of the drug discovery cycle

This technology can also play an important role in generating appropriate cell types for transplantation.
By adding marker and/or selection genes we offer scientists a powerful tool for quality control, purification of populations and identification of sub-populations prior to using the cells.

Customers can either license in this technology to develop their own cell lines or we can carry out the genetic engineering on their behalf. Once a cell line is generated we can provide cell populations, assay development and screening, at our Cambridge automated facility.

Examples

Transgenic mice

SCS has genetically engineered mouse ES cells, such as by adding a human therapeutic target according to a client’s specification and generating a companion cell reagent which the client uses alongside their own genetically engineered mouse models. This enables new chemical compounds, variations of doses etc  to be validated in vivo and broadens the opportunities for further investigation.

Invitro purification of sox2

In this example, our stem cell genetic modification technology was used to modify and differentiate mouse ES cells in vitro. As the mouse ES cells begin to differentiate and make lineages, by turning on our engineering  technology we are able to  purify and separate the cells that are sox2 positive.

Clients engaging SCS for genetic modification and screening services receive the reagents, protocols and data.

We harness the power of stem cells to provide more reliable and consistent assays.

Customers have made use of SCS to generate the data and reagents to validate known targets and engineer a better cell-based assay.

“This SCS- based assay has allowed us to advance more Alzheimer disease compounds and new chemical entities further down the pipeline.”

Sanofi Aventis