CELL BASED ASSAYS

Drug discovery can be approached in a variety of ways. Screening a large number of compounds using defined biochemical assays in an ultra high- throughput format process. However, the effect of a drug on an organism is complex and involves interactions at multiple levels that cannot be predicted using biochemical assays. In order to understand this complexity, an increased use of cell-based screening assays as more biologically relevant surrogates to predict the response of the organism. In addition, at some point in the drug discovery process, predicting cellular toxicity is important. Eukaryotic cell culture is accepted as the model system of choice to get a first approximation of toxicity. Digilab® provides various instrument and tools relate to cell based assays, such as high-throughput cell culture, low volume cell dispensing, etc. 

CELL DISPENSING

It’s critical to have the proper control of temperature, gas flow and orbital shaking to acheive the optimal cell growth conditions in case of high-throughput cell culture. One of the challenges of automating cell based assays is to maintain viability of the cells during the dispensing process as well as dispensing the cells with a high degree of precision. synQUAD™ non contact- dispensing technology has been used successfully in dispensing low volumes of cells and has become an important tool for cell based research.