Drug development with oCelloScope

Pharmaceutical biotechnology uses fermentation and bioprocessing to develop recombinant proteins such as insulin, HPV vaccines and antimicrobial peptides for protein replacement therapy, treatment of infections, prevention of viral diseases, and antibiotics.

As a result, research laboratories require robust techniques to help characterise and monitor producer strains and for assessing drug safety, as well as new ways to replace conventional small molecule drug screening methods.

Real-time monitoring of antimicrobial behaviour

oCelloScope is an automated digital time-lapse bright field imaging system that can analyse up to 96 bacteria-antibiotic combinations. Using standard microtiter plates, you can perform non-invasive, real-time monitoring of producer strains’ behaviour, including microbial¹ and mammalian cell² responses to chemicals, including quantification of morphological features.

For example, Uggerhøj et al. used oCelloScope for real-time monitoring of antimicrobial activity for a vast library of antimicrobial peptides that had been produced starting from anoplin¹.

Such an approach leads to a clearer understanding of the correlation between producer strain phenotype and product yield, as well as a deeper analysis of drug activity on the biological target.

Peer reviewed papers

‘Rational Design of Alpha-Helical Antimicrobial Peptides: Do’s and Don’ts’ Uggerhøj et al. 2015

‘Rapidly derived colorectal cancer cultures recapitulate parental cancer characteristics and enable personalized therapeutic assays’ N. Ashley et al. 2014

‘A mechanism-based pharmacokinetic/pharmacodynamic model allows prediction of antibiotic killing from MIC values for WT and mutants’ D.D. Khan et al 2015

References

1 L. E. Uggerhøj, T. J. Poulsen, J. K. Munk, M. Fredborg, T. E. Sondergaard, N. Frimodt-Moller, P. R. Hansen and R. Wimmer, ChemBioChem, 2015, 16, 242–253.

2 N. Ashley, M. Jones, D. Ouaret, J. Wilding and W. F. Bodmer, J. Pathol., 2014, 234, 34–45.