Assay Development
Customised Drug Screening & Assay Development Programs
StemCell Services can customise your programs and generate large numbers of cells for drug
screening programs or target validation. We offer a customised assay design service for a wide variety of cell
types to meet individual client's needs.
We
can also establish and troubleshoot assays and either validate systems and
pass the protocol to you or alternatively bring your assays in-house
to undertake screening programmes.
We have panels of cell-based assays available which can be developed in physiologically
relevant stem cells and recombinant stem cell lines. Our scientists have expertise
in the isolation and growth of adult and embryonic-derived stem cells,
primary cells and cell lines.
- Inflammation & Immunology
- Metabolism
- CNS e.g. in vitro models of neurotoxicity: production & propagation of neural precursor cells into mature neurons expressing a variety of markers.
- Disease models
ADME & Toxicity
The use of stem cells in screening will overcome costly and labour-intensive studies involving in vivo models. Using human embryonic stem cells and adult tissue-derived progenitor cells, we can generate a number of e.g. hepatocyte or cardiomyocyte reporter cell lines which will allow simultaneous measurement of oxidative stress / inflammation / apoptosis etc, in one stem cell model system. These stem cell models can be compared with primary cell lines and engineered cells and be used for target validation and compound screening.
Ion Channels
We have cloned the complete human NaV family of
voltage-gated sodium ion channels. These clones can be
transfected into your stem
cells of interest and high-throughput assays can be developed in
physiologically relevant human cells using either
a fluorescence-based system or traditional patch-clamping technique.
We have a variety of technologies available for analysing the functional response of cell lines.