• E-mail
• Print
• Comment
• Font Size
• Digg
• del.icio.us
• Discuss article

Molecular Libraries Screening Center at Columbia University Adopts Tecan Freedom EVO Workstations As Part of NIH Roadmap Screening Initiative

Posted on: Monday, 10 April 2006, 09:00 CDT

Tecan, a leading player in the health care supply industry, has signed an agreement with the Molecular Libraries Screening Center at Columbia University (New York, NY) to supply automated workstations for compound screening and profiling. Tecan's experience in instrumentation for cell and enzyme based assays will play a central role in the automation of the screening center.

The unique strength of Columbia's Screening Center, one of ten national centers to make up the NIH Roadmap initiative (http://nihroadmap.nih.gov/), is its experience in cell biology, high content/high resolution automated cellular imaging, and phenotypic assay design and implementation. Tecan's expertise and novel set of instruments for laboratory scale automated cell culture and screening will automate methods from extracting cells from flasks to high throughput screening. Through this and similar projects, Tecan continues to develop more sensitive, more robust, and more easily adaptable technologies to help researchers to fully capitalize on the recent completion of the human genome sequence and further discoveries in molecular and cell biology.

Carl Severinghaus, President of Tecan US, remarked: "Tecan's extensive experience in automating a wide range of cell culture and compound profiling applications was a key factor in our successful bid for this project. We are excited to work closely with Columbia University to develop novel solutions which are potentially suitable for all the laboratories involved in the NIH initiative."

Professor James E. Rothman, Principal Investigator of the Columbia Center and Director of Columbia's Genome Center, said: "We are pleased that Tecan will be our automation partner, not only because of Tecan's excellent reputation, but also because of the much-needed flexibility and modularity its solutions provide for an academic screening site."

Tecan (www.tecan.com) is a leading global player in the Life Sciences supply industry specializing in the development, production, and distribution of advanced automation solutions enabling pharma and academic research, diagnostics, food and veterinary research as well as forensics. Through its REMP subsidiary (www.remp.com), Tecan is the leading supplier of compound and sample storage, management and logistics solutions. Tecan clients are pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies, university research departments and diagnostic laboratories. Founded in Switzerland in 1980, the company has manufacturing, research and development sites in both North America and Europe and maintains a sales and service network in 52 countries. In 2005, Tecan achieved sales of CHF 344.9 million (USD 275.9 Mio.; EUR 222.5 Mio.). Registered shares of Tecan Group are traded on the SWX Swiss Exchange (TK: TECN / Reuters: TECZn.S / Valor: 1210019).

The Molecular Libraries Screening Center Network (MLSCN) is a nationwide consortium of small molecule screening centers that is funded by the NIH to produce innovative chemical tools for use in biological research. The MLSCN performs HTS on assays provided by the research community, against a large library of small molecules maintained in a central molecule repository. The network also performs optimization chemistry required to produce useful in vitro chemical probes (research tools for the targets or phenotypes studied in the assays) from the "hits" identified in the initial screening. The MLSCN has access to a large set of chemically diverse small molecules some of which have known biological activities and others of which have the potential to modulate novel biological functions. Over time, this collection will be expanded and modified to provide a working set of molecules that will target larger domains of "biological space," which represents all of the biomolecular surface domains that can potentially interact with a small molecule. All of the results from the MLSCN's activities will be placed into a public database called PubChem, and information about probe compounds will be made available to all researchers, in both public and private sectors, for their use in studying biology and disease.

Source: Business Wire

More News in this Category