Lampire Biological Laboratories, an industry leading provider of biological reagents and services to the pharmaceutical, diagnostic and bio-medical research communities world-wide and PharmaCadence Analytical Services, LLC have announced a strategic alliance to develop ADME/PK/TOX services. The group will focus on providing comprehensive Drug-Drug interaction testing services and early screening stage teratogenicity assays in Zebrafish and rat whole embryo cultures. PharamCadence President, Dr. Carmen Fernández-Metzler says, “This is a great opportunity for both companies to provide focused excellence in our core areas of expertise. Having Lampire as a partner will allow PharmaCadence to remain focused on delivering innovative analytical solutions while addressing our need for world-class cell culture, antibody production and toxicology expertise.”
PharmaCadence Analytical Services, LLC was founded in 2008 by former Merck DMPK scientists to address a growing need for a local outsourcing partner providing top value. While the group at PharmaCadence has been focused on protein and peptide quantitation by LC-MS/MS, the strategic alliance with Lampire will allow them to offer DMPK services they are very familiar with. “After 14 years of working with DMPK scientists at Merck to design and implement some of the best early stage DMPK assays in the industry, we are very excited to be able to put that knowledge to use with the help of Lampire”, says PharmaCadence Laboratory Director, Rick King. The services business is not new territory for Lampire. They have offered custom antibody design and production services for more than a decade along with an impressive list of animal blood products, cell culture products, and contract manufacturing and packaging for biologic materials. In business for over 35 years, Lampire has a reputation for excellence. Greg Krug, President of Lampire says, ” We are very excited by the opportunity this Strategic Alliance presents to grow our business. The analytical expertise at PharmaCadence is a great compliment to our core capabilities at Lampire. We are very much looking forward to pooling our respective talent to help customers overcome some of the many challenges they face in drug discovery and development. This is a terrific chance for all of us to make a significant difference.”
In addition to Drug-Drug interactions and early stage DMPK studies, the group is offering leading edge toxicology services to help address one of the primary reasons new drug candidates fail in development. Dr, Jedd Hillegass, senior toxicologist at Lampire has worked with a consortium of pharmaceutical companies to develop a standardized protocol for the use of Zebrafish in early teratogenicity screening. According to Dr. Hillegass, the new paradigm is faster and far less expensive than traditional approaches using rats and rabbits. Says Dr. Hillegass, “The use of Zebrafish is allowing us to push teratogenicity screening back into earlier stages of drug discovery where the ‘fail fast , fail cheap’ model helps pharmaceutical companies reduce the money spent testing compounds that really have no chance of becoming marketed drugs. By providing these types of early tox screens in drug discovery, we are helping to reduce the cost of new medicines and helping to assure they are safe for patients.”
