Cellectricon and AstraZeneca Partners in new High Throughput Ion Channel Drug Discovery Technology

Cellectricon has announced a new collaborative agreement with AstraZeneca. Under the agreement Cellectricon will provide AstraZeneca with two of its new high throughput platform, Dynaflow® HT, for ion channel screening.

Cellectricon and AstraZeneca formed and announced collaboration in May 2006 aiming to find a solution to major bottlenecks in ligand gated ion channel screening.

According to both companies, the results from this collaboration have successfully demonstrated the performance of Cellectricon's cell-based microfluidic screening platform. It has clearly demonstrated the opportunity to introduce the fully automated Dynaflow®HT System with unmatched level of stability and throughput while still delivering unique measurement data quality. The Dynaflow®HT System will be launched and commercially available in 2009.

"Collaborating with AstraZeneca has been most rewarding," says Jonas Ohlsson, CEO at Cellectricon. "Driven by solving bottlenecks in drug discovery, Cellectricon's strategy is to bring state-of-the-art products for drug discovery and research to the market through world-class customer collaborations."

"This collaboration aims to accelerate our efforts in ion channel drug discovery and has been very fruitful to date. We look forward to working with the Dynaflow®HT Systems and see the impact of their throughput and cost effectiveness," says Dr. Jan-Erik Nystrom, VP Local Discovery Research Area CNS & Pain Control, Sodertalje, Sweden.

"The strength of this platform is that it is based on many years of cutting-edge academic and industrial research in ion channel drug discovery. I am happy to see us taking a new step together with a leading partner in advancing it further," says Dr. Jon Sinclair, VP Research & Development at Cellectricon.