Cellumen, Inc., a discovery and early safety assessment company, recently announced that it has added a Rat Cardiomyocyte Panel to its CellCiphr® Early Safety Assessment services. Derived from embryonic rodent hearts, Cellumen’s Rat Cardiomyocyte Panel will identify toxic compounds and their corresponding mechanisms of toxicity with unprecedented sensitivity and specificity earlier in the drug development process.
Cellumen’s Rat Cardiomyocyte Panel is based on an H9c2 myoblastic cell line. The panel measures eight integrated endpoints: oxidative stress, mitochondrial function, apoptosis, DNA damage, fatty acid accumulation, cellular hypertrophy and cellular viability.
“In the past 30 years, 28 percent of drug withdrawals were related to cardiac toxicity,” says Patricia “Kate” A. Johnston, Ph.D., Chief Scientific Officer at Cellumen. “As the most widely accepted and published in vitro cardiotoxicity model, the H9c2 cell line is biochemically and electrophysiologically identical to cardiac tissue. We are confident that the addition of this panel to our CellCiphr services will allow for earlier detection of toxic compounds, and prevent the failure of certain drug classes due to cardiac hypertrophy and other cardiac liabilities.”
In addition to the creation of its new CellCiphr service, Cellumen announced that the company has completed two recent customer wins. The first is a fee-for-service contract with one of the world’s largest biotechnology companies. As part of this initial implementation project, Cellumen will begin analysis of 16 compounds in the CellCiphr HepG2, Rat Primary Hepatocyte and the recently-released Rat Cardiomyocyte Panel. This bundled service provides the most comprehensive analysis of the liver and heart for early safety assessment, including the use of cycling cells for DNA damage response and metabolically active cells within two target organs.
“Cellumen has been able to convert 100 percent of initial implementation projects into standard screening contracts,” says D. Lansing Taylor, Ph.D., CEO of Cellumen. “Just recently, we won another contract with a global biotechnology company that was primarily focused on in vivo safety solutions, and fairly skeptical of Cellumen’s incremental predictivity and mechanistic insights over their existing methods. After completing the initial implementation project, they were pleased with Cellumen’s ability to accurately risk-rank compounds, and chose CellCiphr as a faster, less-expensive predictive in vitro technology for early safety assessment.”
Using CellCiphr, this second company received mechanistic insights that would not have been previously available to them. As a result, they have had the opportunity to go back and re-engineer failed compounds. This neuroscience-based biotechnology has decided to adopt Cellumen’s CellCiphr services as part of their routine early safety assessment strategy.
Learn more at www.cellumen.com.
