Discovery scientists using traditional tech often need to make go-no-go decisions on sub-optimal data, says Charles River Laboratories, which has expanded its deal with SAMDI Tech to try and give sponsors more information about candidate compounds.
CRL announced the move this week, explaining it has become the only contract research organization (CRO)—other than SAMDI Tech—that can offer access to the label-free, high throughput mass spectrometry technology for compound characterization.
Wilbert Frieling, CRL’s senior VP, global discovery services, told us the deal was prompted by a desire to accelerate clients’ discovery efforts.
“Drug discovery is about generating quality data rapidly to initiate new programs to improve human health. Most of the traditional technologies used in drug discovery generate results that leave much up to interpretation and have limited throughput capabilities, slowing down progress and increasing costs,” Frieling said. “The SAMDI technology, which combines surface chemistry and mass spectrometry, overcomes the challenges, caveats and limitations of traditional assay formats and generates high quality results faster.”
Traditional assay development uses radioactive or fluorescent dyes to tag molecules of interest. However, the needs for multiple reagents limits the flexibility and speed of these assays and drives up costs.
The SAMDI technology uses a proprietary label-free approach that reduces sample preparation time and, according to Frieling, “eliminates eliminating false positive and false negative results due to optical interference.”
He also cited the system’s flexibility as an asset, explaining it can “analyze biochemical activities and binding events for diverse targets, meaning that SAMDI can be offered to any client as a solution for launching virtually any drug discovery program.”
CRL originally teamed up with SAMDI Tech in 2018, granting the firm access to its collection of lead-like compounds for screening projects.