Technology

The TR-based technology should facilitate and advance drug design significantly. A key problem in the current drug development pathway is the high rate of drug failure, which accounts for a large percentage of all research and development costs. The most common cause of drug failures arises from toxicity and reduced bioavailability of a therapeutic compound in clinical trials. The lack of simple tools to assess toxicity and safety risks for candidate drugs early in the lead identification and drug discovery activities increases the cost, time lag, and risk of failure for drug discovery efforts.

GliaGen’s Translation Regulated (“TR”) expression system represents a unique, previously unknown, highly informative and versatile toxicity screening system methodology for measuring cellular responses that has been validated in over 30 human cell lines.

The most significant advantage of GliaGen’sTR technology is the TR assay readout. The TR Expression System includes novel vectors for selectively directing translation of heterologous proteins exclusively in stressed and dying cells. It provides a straightforward readout that detects subtle changes in ribosomes, and it allows researchers to observe disturbances in protein translation via off-target or on-target activity and to determine quickly if a compound of interest has adverse reactions on cells or tissues.

The TR Expression System offers numerous advantages:

• Delivers Large Signal-to-Noise Ratio: TR-mediated translation is not observed in normal unstressed cells, while stress/death induces a highly significant TR-specific reporter signal.

• Provides a Quick Response: TR-Dependent translation can be observed in minutes, in many cases prior to any significant response detected by standard cell death assays.

• Delivers Highly Informative and Versatile Screening Data: The TR technology can detect cell death/stress produced by apoptotic and necrotic cell death mechanisms.

• Offers Simple Transition from Ex-Vivo to In-Vivo Technology: The TR-based technology simplifies the correlation of cell-to-animal studies due to the universality of the ribosome response.