(Hatfield, PA, May 2015) – PharmaCadence Analytical Services LLC recently completed a move into larger corporate office and laboratory facilities, just minutes from the company’s previous location.

PharmaCadence, a professional analytical services group specializing in high-quality quantitative LC-MS bioanalytical methods for basic research and preclinical pharmaceutical development, needed the expanded facilities to meet the growing client demand for its services.

PharmaCadence now occupies a 5000-square foot, single story, detached building.  The laboratory has almost tripled in size, providing new opportunities for an expanded portfolio of service offerings.

“We are pleased to be settled in a larger facility that gives us the resources to deliver the analytical services our customers need, while allowing our company to continue growing,” says Carmen Fernández-Metzler, company co-founder.

PharmaCadence’s mission is to provide professional analytical support to researchers developing new drugs and innovative therapies to fight disease and improve patient quality of life.

PharmaCadence’s new address is:

1440 Industry Road, Hatfield, PA, 19440

For more information on PharmaCadence Analytical Services LLC, visit www.pharmacadence.com, or call 215-853-2627.

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.”

PharmaCadence can now offer intact molecular weight measurements of proteins and peptides by MALDI TOFMS. The use of surrogate peptides for the quantification of proteins has become standard practice. However, there are many potential problems when using a peptide to represent an entire protein. By applying MALDI TOFMS in the early stages of method development for surrogate peptide assays, better information can be obtained about the nature of the protein being analyzed. MALDI TOFMS molecular weight determinations have also proved valuable for the generation of active immunogens for antibody preparation. Knowing the number and distribution of haptens conjugated can help quickly identify the best approach to antigen synthesis.

The team at PharmaCadence has worked with partners at Lampire Biological Laboratories to implement serial micro sampling protocols for use in mouse studies. Dr. Jedd Hillegass, Senior Toxicologist at Lampire and PharmaCadence President, Dr. Carmen Fernández-Metzler have collaborated to establish reliable protocols that dramatically reduce the use of animals while providing superior experimental results. The collaborators recently proved the value of the approach with help from Jeff Pelletier at Fox Chase Chemical Diversity Center. The group used serial micro sampling to investigate the pharmacokinetics of a Riluzole prodrug in mice. The study saved more than 90 animals over a traditional experimental design requiring one animal per time point, and allowed the researchers to measure changes in PK parameters ordinarily lost in the variability of mouse per time point studies. The results of the study were recently presented at the AAPS 2012 meeting in Chicago.

The team at PharmaCadence has taken on the challenge of defining quantitative analysis with LC-MS in the spirit of systems biology. The group has demonstrated methods that are capable of quantifying both large and small molecule components of an enzyme complex to assist biological researchers in their quest to study and understand biological systems rather than just the individual molecular components making up those systems. Dr. Rick King, Laboratory Director at PharmaCadence recently presented the approach at the CPSA 2012 conference. He showed data from UGT enzyme systems where a single method was used to quantify the UGT 2B7 enzyme, the AZT drug substrate and the AZT-glucuronide conjugate formed as a product of the reaction providing a more complete biological picture from a single analysis method.

PharmaCadence and Eksigent are collaborating on systems and applications focused on reduced flow UPLC. Until very recently, the LC-MS world was divided into two parts, the nano-scale separations common to protein analysis and the analytical scale separations common with small molecule drug applications. The goal of the collaboration is to define the middle ground between the two. With flows from 20 ul/min to 200 ul/min the Eksigent ExpressHT delivers accurate binary gradients with a level of precision unmatched in this flow range. The team at PharmaCadence is working to understand how these reduced flows affect LC-MS assay performance and to evaluate the reliablility of day to day use for quantitative LC-MS. The work has been the subject of recent presentations at ASMS, PittCon and CPSA. Currently, the PharmaCadence lab relies exclusively on the Eksigent microflow platform and are able to demonstrate both the business and scientific arguments for using micro flow LC.