High content screening, Drug profiling and Safety

To increase the speed of detection of hit-to-lead process, BIOalternatives can manage for you:

• Screening projects, with a special reference to cellular/High Content (HCS) projects,
• Drug profiling services to evidence the potencies of your compounds in the largest or deepest ways,
• Early safety profiling for predictive toxicity using cross-screenings in panels of normal cells.

High Content Screening (HCS) is a powerful approach for the fast selection from your compound library (chemical substances, crude extracts...) of a promising compound against a specific biological activity or target. This screening services is well adapted to test several hundred compounds at single or few concentrations. Typically, in this system, products are tested in 96-well microplates for the assay in:

• Validated HCS-compatible assays from BIOalternatives
• Specific targets of your interest (feasibility/validation step needed)
  

Using automated image analysis- , flow cytometry- or ELISA-based methods, we can measure a set of biological events or markers in cell cultures (primary cells or cell lines), i.e. targeting:

• Cell viability, proliferation, apoptosis,
• Signal transduction,
• Cytokines, chemokines, growth factors release,
• Cell differentiation,
• Extracellular matrix synthesis or degradation,
• Free radicals and stress,
• Cell type-dependent specific assays,
• Etc.
  

Classically, a secondary screening will achieve dose- or time- dependant effect determination (i.e IC50 value).

BIOalternatives provides an array of in vitro assays for compound profiling in order to learn more about the effects of your lead compounds, in many fields such as:

• Immuno-inflammation,
• Tissue inflammation,
• Tissue morphogenesis, differentiation,
• Wound healing,
• Central and peripheral neurobiology,
• Stress and aging,
• Pigmentation & other tissue specific pathways.
  

This full service includes the profiling of compound-induced gene expression, the analysis of activated signaling pathways and many cell-based functional assays. Such a profiling is also of special interest, e.g. compound repositioning or IP coverage.

Safety assessment is an important criterion for compound development before expensive preclinical and clinical studies. In order to predict efficiently in vitro cytotoxicity, or specific cellular impacts BIOalternatives provides cross-screening service for predictive toxicity and safety profiling in a wide range of normal cells (blood and immune cells, neurons, epithelial and mesenchymal cells...):

• in vitro cytotoxicity mini-profile using high content assays,
• Apoptosis assays,
• Phototoxicity assays,
• Inflammation-related assays,
• Neuro-cytotoxicity assays.
  

This service is proposed as a support to your research, it is not dedicated to the completion of official toxicity dossiers.