Isogenica opens new automation facility

Isogenica Ltd today announced the opening of a new automation facility at their current location, Chesterford Research Park.

Following a substantial refit of additionally acquired space, this new facility will house the high throughput CIS display platform for the discovery of biological therapeutics, diagnostics and reagents using Tecan liquid handling robots and screening equipment. This development brings additional capacity to the company for the selection of next generation molecules for biopharmaceutical projects with a capacity of up to two hundred selections per week.

Kevin Matthews, CEO, Isogenica, commented of the facility: "We are delighted to have been able to expand our capabilities with the opening of this new facility, a primary benefit of which will be our ability to further the industrialisation of our CIS display technology. Our significant investment in this new facility is to accommodate recent increases in activity in our peptide/protein selection platform and to fulfill future demand from both industry and academia."

The first half of 2011 has seen Isogenica achieve significant success with the announcement of new collaborative projects. In March the company published details of a service agreement with Johnson & Johnson Pharmaceutical Research & Development to carry out discovery work with the Centyrin scaffold. In June the company joined forces with Biolauncher, specialists in the provision of services to growing life science businesses and Cresset Biomolecular Discovery, developers of specialist software for calculating and comparing the molecular field characteristics of chemical compounds. This latest alliance aims to develop an innovative end-to-end small molecule discovery platform by integrating their expertise in peptide library design, evolutionary screening, next generation sequencing, state of the art structural analytics, and molecular field-based computational chemistry to identify active compounds against high-value therapeutic targets.

In addition to strategic alliances, Isogenica also expanded their business development and customer support operations into North America in March 2011.