28 Jun EMD Biosciences partners with European biotech company
MADISON — EMD Biosciences Inc., a supplier of premium tools for proteomics and disease pathway analysis, recently announced it has formed a strategic partnership with The Automation Partnership (TAP), a manufacturer of innovative industrial automation for life science applications.
This partnership is designed to enable EMD and TAP to optimize and validate EMD’s products on the Piccolo system, TAP’s fully automated system for recombinant protein production.
The Piccolo system, a technology for assay development and protein engineering laboratories, was developed in consultation with a consortium of leading experts from three major pharmaceutical companies. The system combines bacterial and insect cell culture with automated harvesting, lysis and purification units. It is designed to allow scientists to rapidly identify the best construct and host strain, and recreate optimal culture conditions for target proteins.
Applying key reagents from the EMD portfolio to the Piccolo system will allow scientists to immediately use this research platform to generate proteins from bacterial or insect cells without the labor-intensive steps typically involved in manual optimization of protein production.
“We believe the addition of optimized consumables to Piccolo will help scientists produce specific proteins in days, rather than months,” said Richard Wales, of the business development group at TAP. “Having more time to study their proteins will enable better-defined compounds to advance into pre-clinical research and could be a significant factor in greatly reducing clinical phase compound attrition rates through earlier decision-making.”
EMD Biosciences is located in Madison and San Diego. It provides a range of life science research products used in disease-related life science research at universities as well as in the pharmaceutical and biotech industry. The company is part of Merck KGaA’s Life Science and Analytics division and operates as EMD Biosciences Inc. in North America and Merck Biosciences outside North America.