Allele Custom Services for Drug Screening Companies

http://allelebiotech.com/blogs/2010/06/allele-custom-services-for-drug-screening-companies/
Many target discovery and validation programs can benefit from RNA interference, fluorescent proteins, stem cells, and viral delivery systems. However, applications of these technologies require special reagents and laboratory know-how. Even when available, many generic reagent kits are not tailored for your particular needs in screening or validation.

At Allele, we accelerate your discovery efforts with custom RNAi screening, fluorescence based assays, and cell model development services.

1) Our RNAi platform, based on our patented shRNA/miRNA technologies, use DNA linear template, plasmid, lentivirus, retrovirus, or baculovirus vectors that prompt cells to endogenously express RNAi. As a result, our screens offer advantages over synthetic siRNAs:
• Higher levels of consistency
• Greater delivery and gene silencing efficiencies
• Accessibility to difficult-to-transfect cells, including primary cells
• Potential for inducible RNAi expression
• More persistent silencing with shRNA under Allele’s own IP–you may not need to license siRNA patents!

2) Fluorescent proteins (FPs), which can span the entire visual spectrum, have become some of the most widely used genetically encoded tags. Genes encoding FPs alone or as fusions to a protein of interest may be introduced to cells by a number of different methods, including simple plasmid transfection or viral transduction. Allele Biotech is one of a few companies that develop and improve FPs through fundamental research. We have so far achieved:
• The brightest cyan and green FPs, true monomers for minimum artifact or cytotoxicity
• The brightest yellow and red FPs from lancelet, only FPs from vertebrate
• mTFP1 as the best FRET donor by 3 independent reports
• Photoconvertible FPs for super imaging or kinetic labeling
• Delivery on plasmid, retrovirus, lentivirus, baculovirus vectors

3) As a major advancement in the stem cell field, it has recently been shown that mouse and human differentiated cells may be reprogrammed into stem-like, pluripotent cells by the introduction of defined transcription factors. These induced stem cells (iPSCs) provide unprecedented resources of cells of different differentiation stages for functional testing and drug screening. Allele Biotech develops and provides state-of-the-art reagents in convenient forms for iPSC production
• iPS factors carried on lentivirus, retrovirus, baculovirus for different cell types
• Availability in combination with fluorescent proteins under own IP, and drug resistant genes
• 4-in-1 or 2-in-1 effective use of iPS factors on one viral vector
• Feeder cells of human origin expressing factors essential for stem cell culturing

4) Introduction of protein factors, miRNA, promoter-reporter, and virtually any other genetic element of interest via the most efficient viral packaging systems.
• Introducing protein-FP fusion, promoter-FP reporter, photoactivatable factors for cell-based assays
• Introducing critical factors for cell immortalization
• Episomal or integrated expression using baculoviral vectors
• High throughput, systematic expression of whole class of molecules in any type of cell
• High titer viral packaging at low cost for delivery to animal tissues

In addition, the Allele team can provide custom-designed assays that can be used for assaying enzyme activities in almost any pathway, such as the EGF pathway, TNF response/apoptosis pathway, nuclear receptors, etc. We utilize technically advanced methods to provide our partners with advantages over alternative methods or other services.

New Product of the Week 06-28-10 to 07-03-10: Eco-friendly mammalian tissue culture plates, 40% less plastic to the environment, 40% less cost to your budget, contact our sales rep today for quotes and details.

Promotion of the Week 06-28-10 to 07-03-10: Oct3/4 iPS lentivirus with RFP as marker, new to the market, this week only all kits containing Oct3/4-RFP same price as the original, non-RFP versions, save ~$50!

Allele Biotech Receives Funding from the National Cancer Institute (NCI) to Produce Cancer Antigens

Cancer formation is a heterogeneous and complex process, involving many factors and cellular signaling pathways. There are more than 1,200 potential cancer biomarkers identified in the literature by a 2006 review, which, if analyzed in multiplexicity, may provide the best potential for reliable and early detection of cancer. Many proteins including most cancer antigens become post-translationally modified (PTM) during the “secretory process”, which involves of a journey from their site of synthesis in the rough endoplasmic reticulum (ER), through the Golgi apparatus and then to various cellular and extracellular destinations.

Examples of protein modifications include glycosylation, phosphorylation, acetylation, and amidation. Of these, the most complex procedure is glycosylation, involving several enzymes. There are increasing demands for these glycosylated human proteins in good quantity, purity and affordability by the scientific community to perform fundamental and clinical studies in relation to cancer. Such proteins can not be expressed in bacteria or yeast because those cells do not carry out equivalent PTM as in mammalian cells. Allele Biotech has chosen a modified baculovirus expression systems (MBVES) as the main method for producing glycoproteins and the proposal was chosen by the NCI for funding of $150,000, approximately 75% of the cost of producing 10 glycosylated cancer antigen proteins in the first phase of 6 months. The remaining funding of ~$50,000 mostly in indirect costs will be covered by Allele’s own funds. This SBIR contract will be partially subcontracted to the University of California , San Diego (UCSD) during the glycan analysis phase. The work will be performed in Allele’s San Diego facility and UCSD’s GlycoTechnology Core facility.


This news is released by Allele Biotechnology & Pharmaceuticals, Inc. through AlleleNews, for in-between experiments