UPM Biomedicals has entered into an agreement with PerkinElmer Health Sciences to act as a distributor of the 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, bringing together PerkinElmer’s cell imaging and automation solutions and knowledge, and 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 better resembles the conditions inside the human body, and can be effectively handled at room temperature, making them well suited for scale up and automation without compromising performance. Combined with GrowDase, which enables effective one-step recovery of cells for downstream processing applications, this provides an ideal solution for high throughput 3D cell culture applications, offering more reproducible and reliable results to help predict how drugs will work in vivo.
PerkinElmer’s Opera Phenix Plus automated high-content screening system is the ideal complement to GrowDex hydrogels, and this combined solution has already been successfully used in a number of notable research projects, including automated drug sensitivity and resistance testing of patient-derived cells for personalised cancer treatment research.