Thursday, December 08, 2016
Labcyte Inc. and Notable Labs today announced a collaboration to apply the unique capabilities of Labcyte’s revolutionary Echo® acoustic liquid handling technology to screen individual cancer patients’ tumor cells. This functional screening identifies which available drugs or drug combinations may be most effective at treating their cancer.
“Our service is designed to provide information that may help clinicians prioritize the best available options for individualized patient care in an actionable timeframe,” said Pete Quinzio, co-founder of Notable Labs. “Our belief is that testing drugs directly on patients’ cancer cells will lead to a better understanding of biological mechanisms of disease, improve treatment success, and reduce unnecessary side effects.”
Labcyte’s acoustic liquid handling technology uses sound energy to transfer samples and reagents more precisely, accurately and cost-effectively than traditional methods, enabling entirely new capabilities that are difficult or impossible to accomplish with other techniques. Acoustic liquid handling technology is contactless, eliminating the use of pipettes and reducing the volumes required for compounds and samples.
Notable Labs will utilize the unique attributes of Labcyte’s Echo liquid handler in a fully automated, high-throughput laboratory to functionally assess the effects of FDA-approved drugs on live primary cancer cells from individual patients. The various chemotherapies, targeted agents, and non-oncology classes of drugs can be tested alone and in combinations to identify efficacy and specificity against cancer, in a way that was not possible before.
Mark Fischer-Colbrie, Chief Executive Officer of Labcyte commented, “Augmenting today’s precision medicine efforts with functional screening could dramatically improve outcomes for patients and reduce healthcare costs by utilizing a more comprehensive data set to identify potential drug or drug combinations for an individual patient. With such promise for saving lives, we are committed to doing everything we can to accelerate the development of this strategy and expand its use. We applaud Notable Labs, a pioneer in this field in North America, for their vision and their efforts to improve and enhance patient care.”
About Labcyte Inc.
Labcyte, a global biotechnology tools company headquartered in Sunnyvale, California, is revolutionizing liquid handling. Echo® liquid handling systems use sound to precisely transfer liquids without contact, eliminating the use of pipettes. Labcyte instruments are used worldwide throughout the pharmaceutical and biotechnology industries, as well as by hospitals, service laboratories, contract research organizations, and academic institutions. Our customers work across a wide spectrum of scientific research, including drug discovery, genomics, proteomics, diagnostics and personalized medicine. Labcyte has 58 U.S. patents and others internationally. For more information, visit www.labcyte.com.
About Notable Labs
Notable Labs’ mission is to change the way cancer is treated, which starts with putting patients first. The company is developing a personalized treatment service for cancer patients that will prioritize combinations of FDA-approved treatments that can be immediately prescribed by a doctor. Focusing on individual patients and existing treatments, the company is discovering novel uses of drugs and defining mechanisms underlying development of cancer progression and drug resistance. Using modern data science and robotics, Notable Labs is building a scalable, iterative model with the ultimate aim of turning treatment selection into a data problem. Headquartered in San Francisco, California, the company is currently partnering with clinicians at several research hospitals in the United States and Canada to identify promising, actionable treatments for relapsed and refractory acute leukemia patients. For more information, visit www.notablelabs.com.
Contacts
Bioscribe, Inc. for Labcyte:
Nicole Litchfield, 415-793-6468
nicole@bioscribe.com
or
Notable Labs
info@notablelabs.com
Source:businesswire.com
