Customer Spotlights

"The choice of a suitable screening platform is essential to my success as a developer. Traditional methods are insufficient when considering a large number of hybridomas immediately after the cloning process. The Octet RED96 system is able to support my assay needs during a critical time in the workflow, with a confidence that can’t be obtained from reporter-based assays."

-Jason Goldstein, Founder

Annular Biotech provides contract manufacturing and early-stage development of custom monoclonal antibodies (mAbs). With a combination of development speed and optimization of epitope binding, Annular delivers high quality mAbs to researchers across industry and academia. The company’s “ABitope Kit” gives users the ability to utilize a diverse number of antibodies as a panel to assist in R&D, diagnostics, and therapeutic applications.

The Octet RED96 system has been used by Annular to improve the efficiency of clone screening and selection. Rapid assays for mAb quantitation, confirmation of antigen binding, and relative ranking by binding rates help to quickly reduce a screen of over a thousand clones to a more manageable library of high-value clones. Epitope binning assays on the top clones also provide more information about specificities and uses, particularly in diagnostic application development.

Annular chose the Octet RED96 system for its speed in screening thousands of samples and its versatility in providing multiple insights into the produced mAbs.

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"The Octet HTX system, in conjunction with automation developed at Avitide, has been part of how we have increased our screening capabilities from 500 to 10,000 binding events per day. This enables Avitide to screen and perform fully comprehensive biophysical interactions across more ligands and provide our partners with valuable information at the industry standard."

-Ethan Dow, Scientist

Avitide, based in Lebanon, New Hampshire, develops high-performance affinity purification solutions for the manufacture of life-saving biotherapeutics. By simplifying complex protein purification challenges that currently require multiple chromatography steps, Avitide’s affinity separation technology enables its pharmaceutical partners to achieve faster bioprocess development timelines and lower manufacturing cost for a range of biomolecules including enzymes, novel scaffolds, antibody-based therapeutics, recombinant vaccines, and gene therapies.

Using off the shelf biosensors like Streptavidin, Nickel-NTA, Protein A, Protein G and anti-human Fc, Avitide uses the Octet HTX system to screen purified ligands. To achieve maximum throughput, the Octet HTX system is paired with a Twister II microplate handler from Caliper Life Sciences to continually resupply the instrument with biosensors and sample plates for around the clock, unattended operation.

Avitide turned to the Octet HTX system to increase capacity and keep pace with a workflow capable of producing upwards of 2000 clones every four days. The 384-well microplate format processed by the Octet system also reduces analyte consumption, measures from 40 µL sample volumes during this early phase, and lent itself to laboratory automation. In four years of operation, Avitide has increased its platform capacity tenfold — high throughput instrumentation such as the Octet HTX is key to allow this throughput.

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"After having trained over a hundred people on the Octet RED96 system, I can attest to its being easy to understand — both the hardware and software. The layout inside the instrument immediately shows what people need to understand about its operation. The software is well-laid out, intuitive, and has flexible features like changing the step size during an active assay that are a real benefit."

-Debby Pheasant, Technical Associate

The Biophysical Instrumentation Facility (BIF) within the Department of Biology at MIT houses instruments for aiding in the elucidation of macromolecular structure and interactions. Researchers within the university and from other universities nearby can access 7 different instrument platforms, including the Octet RED96 system, to run their samples on.

With users from multiple disciplines regularly utilizing the BIF, the Octet RED96 system here has been used across a range of molecules and applications, from measuring changes in binding affinities to support mutational analysis to characterizing more complex interactions such as nuclear pore complex assembly and the nanoscale folding of DNA (also known as DNA origami). Debby is able to get most new users up and running with their Octet assays with a short 2-hour training.

The BIF chose the Octet RED96 system after users in the department first became familiar with BLI using the BLItz system. The ease of obtaining binding affinities continued to draw in new users, limiting the availability of the BLItz system. The increased throughput of the Octet RED96 system in a shared facility has helped increase access once again to fast affinity data.

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"The addition of the Pioneer FE has significantly improved our fragment screening capabilities with regard to speed and accuracy, displacing other label-free technologies in this space. Its versatility and robust nature has also allowed pioneering work in other areas like irreversible inhibitor characterization."

-Phillip Schwartz, PhD, Senior Scientist

Takeda Pharmaceuticals U.S.A., Inc., is a wholly owned subsidiary of Takeda Pharmaceutical Company Limited, Japan's largest pharmaceutical company. The respective companies currently market metabolic and cardiovascular, respiratory and immunology, central nervous system, oncology and general medicine products and seek to bring further innovation in these areas through a robust development pipeline.

The Pioneer FE system at Takeda is being used primarily for fragment screening, making quick work of libraries with upwards of 2000 compounds. Dr. Schwartz has also been an innovator in characterizing irreversible small molecule inhibition, developing a Commitment to Covalency parameter as a potency reporting metric.

Takeda chose the Pioneer FE system to launch their fragment screening projects because of its superior fragment screening data. Using the OneStep^® diSPR feature to measure at multiple concentrations instead of just a single concentration per injection, the Pioneer FE system is not only saving time but providing more data to distinguish real signal from background.

Learn more about Takeda Pharmaceuticals USA, Inc.

Learn more about the Commitment to Covalency parameter and characterizing irreversible small molecule inhibition.

Learn more about the Pioneer FE system.