BellBrook Labs Launches a New Transcreener HTS Enzyme Assay

Madison, Wis. (PRWEB) January 11, 2010 -- BellBrook Labs today announced that it has launched a new product in their proprietary Transcreener HTS Assay platform. The Transcreener GDP FI Assay was developed for detection of GTPases, a large family of enzymes that play diverse roles in normal and disease-related cell processes. The new assay overcomes a longstanding problem in GTPase detection in that it relies on direct detection of GDP rather than phosphate. Phosphate is a component of many biomolecules and commonly used reagents, and its ubiquitous presence in biological samples causes high background and false positives in the current GTPase enzyme assays. BellBrook’s new assay detects GDP - a much more specific product of GTPase enzymes - eliminating the background problems associated with phosphate detection.

Transcreener is a universal, high throughput biochemical assay platform based on detection of nucleotides, which are formed by thousands of cellular enzymes, many of which catalyze the covalent regulatory reactions that are central to cell signaling and represent new opportunities for therapeutic intervention. It relies on highly specific antibodies that detect nucleotides coupled with homogenous fluorescent detection formats suitable for automated HTS applications. A single Transcreener assay can be used with any enzyme that produces a given nucleotide, allowing detection of hundreds of different drug targets. It is the only enzyme assay method that allows direct detection of nucleotide enzyme products without the use of additional coupling or reporter enzymes, which are a common source of interference by chemical library compounds. BellBrook currently holds three patents on the Transcreener technology and the company is pursuing additional patent applications. In addition to BellBrook’s own Transcreener line, a number of other companies in the Life Science sector including Invitrogen, CisBio and Evotec have licensed the Transcreener technology for their own HTS assay products and/or screening services.

The new GDP assay is similar to BellBrook’s flagship product, the Transcreener ADP Assay, which was introduced in 2006, and has since been validated by pharmaceutical companies worldwide in tens of millions of HTS assays. The company launched a fluorescence polarization GDP assay in 2009, and developed the new fluorescence intensity assay to target academic laboratories that may not have access to an expensive multimode plate reader. The assay incorporates a novel non-fluorescent quencher licensed from Li-Cor Biosciences in addition to BellBrook’s antibody technology. Binding of GDP to the antibody displaces a red tracer, which relieves quenching and results in a fluorescence increase. The positive fluorescent signal is another unique feature of the assay and makes it attractive to new users who are not familiar with competitive immunoassay formats such as TR-FRET and FP.

About BellBrook Labs. BellBrook Labs, LLC was founded in 2002 and currently employs 21 people. The company develops detection reagents and microfluidic devices that accelerate the discovery of more effective therapies for cancer and other debilitating diseases. Transcreener® is a patented high throughput screening assay platform that was introduced in 2005 and is used to identify inhibitors for kinases and other types of protein drug targets. The iuvo™ Microconduit Array technology is a line of unique microscale devices for miniaturization and automation of advanced cell models that are more representative of human physiology. Visit BellBrook’s website for more information: www.bellbrooklabs.com.

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