Drug discovery is the ultimate goal for many of our clients. Speed is essential in the quest for new therapeutics. Most importantly, this is driven by the urgent search for cures and treatments for illnesses. It is also driven by financial concerns because anything that can shorten the time to market means larger returns on investment. Unfortunately, drug discovery is a long and expensive process.
ABS was born out of the frustrations that researchers and their organizations face. There is too much to do and too little time to accomplish the most important goals. It was obvious when ABS was founded over thirty years ago and even more so today that too much time is spent on preparatory rather than key activities. A prime example of this is cell culture.
Cells or cell extracts are used in many high throughput screens. Scientists can spend weeks and often months growing cells before they can begin their real work of discovery. Cell culture is a labor and resource intensive activity. Staff are needed to optimize, repeatedly split and feed cells, prepare master and working banks, clean incubators, etc. Considerable laboratory space must be committed to laminar flow hoods, centrifuges, and other equipment. Once the cells are grown, processed, and QC’d, the cells are inventoried, and cell banks are placed in storage. These processes are repeated over and over again. They are fundamental prerequisites for research, but their preparation delays and diverts resources from discovery.
ABS spares drug researchers the extensive preparatory work of cell culture and cell processing. We developed our Cell Store™ program to let scientists focus on discovery, not growing, processing, and maintaining cell inventories. We begin with your cells, or we can engineer stable cell lines or transiently transfect cells. Then, we can grow large quantities of your cells, process, QC them, and store them for you. Ready to use cells are then delivered to you as needed. By integrating with ABS, your resources are freed for discovery. Everything is handled by our experts while you remain in control of the entire process. We are an extension your laboratories. Please contact us to see how this can work for you.
