UPM Biomedicals has entered into an agreement with PerkinElmer to act as a distributor of the UPM GrowDex and GrowDase range of products. This new collaboration will offer researchers a complete solution for high throughput screening (HTS) of 3D cell cultures in early drug discovery, combining PerkinElmer’s cell imaging and automation solutions and knowledge with UPM’s animal-free 3D reagent offerings and expertise.
Automated HTS is frequently used to assess the therapeutic potential for hundreds of candidate drugs in parallel, and the rise of 3D cell culture approaches has created a need for new high-quality reagents suitable for HTS applications such as cancer drug screening. UPM’s nanofibrillar cellulose GrowDex hydrogels create an environment that resembles the conditions inside the human body, and can be effectively handled at room temperature, making them well suited for scale up and automation. Combined with GrowDase – which enables effective one-step recovery of cells for downstream processing applications – this provides a solution for high throughput 3D cell culture applications, offering more reproducible and reliable results to help predict how drugs will work in vivo.
Johana Kuncova-Kallio, Director at UPM Biomedicals commented: “This solution brings together the instrument, software and cell culture matrices to make life easier for researchers, providing a high level of consistency between experiments. It will be exciting to see how this collaboration will help advance research and speed up the drug development process. Together with PerkinElmer, we have ensured that the products are ready to ship immediately.”
Alan Fletcher, Senior Vice President Life Science at PerkinElmer, added, “Establishing the physiological relevance of potential therapeutic approaches earlier in the research cycle is crucial to advancing drug discovery and reducing clinical trial failure rates. By collaborating with UPM to offer their innovative 3D cell reagents, we are able to expand our offering for 3D cell culture models and further help researchers get to the critical insights they need faster to uncover successful drug candidates.”
