Massachusetts General Hospital enters into a Technology Alliance Partnership with IntelliCyt for the Development of CRISPR Functional Screening Applications
June 03, 2016
CRISPR/Cas9 genome editing technology holds great promise for identifying therapeutic drugs targets. Through high-throughput CRISPR functional screening, improving drug selection is expected to ultimately result in better, safer, more efficacious drugs.
Albuquerque, NM and Boston, MA – June 3, 2016. IntelliCyt, a leading provider of integrated platforms that accelerate drug discovery, antibody discovery and immuno-oncology research today announced a collaboration with Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) to further the development of high throughput, functional-array screening of a CRISPR/Cas9 library. These targeted genome editing screens will provide insight into the complex biology of Acute Myeloid Leukemia (AML). MGH will utilize IntelliCyt’s iQue® Screener platform to profile phenotypic and functional endpoints of cells and secreted proteins through the use of cell-based and bead-based assays in MGH’s advanced phenotypic genome editing and immune-profile programs.
IntelliCyt’s iQue Screener platform is an integrated instrument, software, and reagent system that offers rapid, multiplexed analysis of cell and bead-based samples in 96-, 384-, and 1536-well plates. The iQue Screener’s proprietary rapid sampling technology uniquely enables rapid assessment of cells in suspension, such as those found in blood and bone marrow, by miniaturizing the assay format, which conserves precious patient samples for further analysis. Profiling phenotypic and functional endpoints of cells using cell-based assays, while simultaneously analyzing secreted proteins using bead-based assays, generates rich information from the fewest numbers of cells. Plates are processed rapidly, and software-assisted automation, analysis, and experiment-level visualization tools help reveal deep insight into complex biology of AML which will allow MGH to rapidly evaluate which drugs would most likely provide the best possible outcome in terms of safety and efficacy.
“The power of IntelliCyt’s proprietary technology combines high-throughput AND high content information,” said Janette Phi, Chief Business Officer of IntelliCyt. “We are excited to collaborate with MGH to demonstrate the utility of the iQue Screener products for the selection of drug candidates in AML with the combination of genome editing information and functional responses of cells and cytokines.”
“The iQue Screener allows us to collect multi-parameter information from a limited number of cells in 96- or 384-well plate-based format,” said David Sykes, MD, PhD, Hematology, Massachusetts General Hospital Cancer Center. “It is fast and reliable. The plug-and-play setup of the instrument and excellent software makes it just as easy to run one plate as a quick pilot as it is to run 20 plates in a high-throughput screen.”
About Massachusetts General Hospital
Massachusetts General Hospital, founded in 1811, is the original and largest teaching hospital of Harvard Medical School. The MGH conducts the largest hospital-based research program in the United States, with an annual research budget of more than $800 million and major research centers in AIDS, cardiovascular research, cancer, computational and integrative biology, cutaneous biology, human genetics, medical imaging, neurodegenerative disorders, regenerative medicine, reproductive biology, systems biology, transplantation biology and photomedicine. In July 2015, MGH returned into the number one spot on the 2015-16 U.S. News & World Report list of “America’s Best Hospitals.” Visit: http://www.massgeneral.org
About IntelliCyt
IntelliCyt Corporation manufactures and sells instrumentation, software and reagents that facilitate the study of cells and their components to gain a better understanding of normal and disease processes. This information speeds the discovery and development of new drugs and provides new insight for the diagnosis of diseases. IntelliCyt’s products are used worldwide throughout the pharmaceutical and biotechnology industries and in nonprofit research labs. For more information, please visit www.intellicyt.com
Media Contact
Click here to contact IntelliCyt.