Reaction Biology Corporation ("RBC") today announced that it has been awarded an SBIR grant from the National Cancer Institute to create a new kinase profiling and high throughput screening method using radioisotopes and microarrays. The $940,000 grant will be used to migrate the current well-plate radioisotope methods onto RBC's DiscoveryDot™ nanoliter screening platform.
Protein kinase dysfunction is a key factor in cancer, inflammation and diabetes. Screening and profiling kinase inhibitors has been a major research and development effort in the pharmaceutical industry. While screening kinase activity with radioisotope detection is considered by many in the drug-discovery industry to be the "gold standard" of kinase assays, use of the format is limited by expense and the difficulty of radioactive disposal. The DiscoveryDot™ platform uses only a fraction of the reagents compared to well plate methods. "Due to our nano-scale format, the amount of radioisotope used in the process should be minimal," said RBC Chief Technology Officer Haiching Ma, Ph.D. "This should lead to far fewer disposal and handling problems, and reduced cost overall."
Reaction Biology, based in Malvern, Pa., provides high throughput screening services to the biotechnology and pharmaceutical industry. The company uses a patent-pending combination of technologies to perform screening at the
nanoliter scale, while preserving quality, speed and simplicity.
Combining genomics microarray printing technology and picoliter aerosol deposition, RBC has commercialized a novel technology that drives HTS to new levels of simplicity and efficiency.