Cytoo has announced the first results from the Institut Curie, confirming a major advance in cell analysis made possible by adhesive micropatterns.
The Institut Curie team demonstrated that a rigorous quantification of the cell-wide internal organisation could be obtained using adhesive micropatterns - a technology for which Cytoo holds an exclusive licence.
Adhesive micropatterns control internal cell organisation.
In addition, they could decipher protein redistribution upon a drug treatment that was previously undetectable in conventional cell-culture conditions.
The scientific team, led by Dr Bruno Goud, research director of the sub-cellular structure and cellular dynamics laboratory, was also able to obtain significant results by analysing only 12-20 cells, compared with the hundreds or thousands usually needed in traditional cell-culture conditions.
'With this study, we have now unequivocally demonstrated that controlling cell adhesion is going to be critical in all fields involving quantitative cell analysis,' said Michel Bornens, chief scientific officer at Cytoo and co-author of the article, entitled 'Probabilistic density maps to study global endomembrane organisation', published online in 'Nature Methods' on 31 May 2010.
The results of the study, also named 'Probabilistic density maps to study global endomembrane organisation', indicates that the use of adhesive micropatterns will benefit research by offering increased insight, sensitivity and relevance in deciphering protein functions and cell mechanics.
Cytoo believes that, for those involved in drug discovery, such results would translate into more hits and more meaningful data in cell-based screening, while requiring the analysis of fewer cells per condition.
It would also enable biologists to detect effects at much lower doses.
Alexandra Fuchs, co-chief executive officer at Cytoo, said: 'We want to bring to the attention of the market that leading centres in the world are now using our products and that this technology is enabling them to detect and analyse cell functions that were previously impossible to detect and analyse.
'We believe that our technology will have a huge impact in the drug-discovery world by increasing assay sensitivity, generating statistically relevant data and accelerating analysis,' she added.
More than 100 researchers in private laboratories and research centres around the world, such as the National Institutes of Health (NIH), the European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL), Harvard University and the Dana Farber Cancer Center, have adopted the company's HCA products.
Cytoo expects more results of this kind to be published.
The company addresses critical needs in pharmaceutical and biotechnology drug discovery, as cell-based assays and high content screening (HCS) are said to be among the most dynamic fields in life science research markets.
However, quantitative cell analysis for drug discovery has been hampered by the variability in cell shape and behaviour when using common cell-culture ware such as standard well plates and Petri dishes.
Even with large cohorts of cells and sophisticated image algorithms, expected effects are too often buried in the noise, thus affecting the sensitivity, throughput and reliability of the screens, according to Fuchs.
Results published in the 'Nature Methods' article also highlight the advantages of cellular normalisation using micropatterning and show differences in the results in the same statistical tests that were performed on non-patterned cells.
The Institut Curie team found that, for strong phenotypes (an observable characteristic or trait of an organism), such as Golgi-dispersion after nocodazole treatment, significant differences were detected, although eight times more cells were needed.
On the other hand, subtle differences, such as those seen in the treatment with cytochalasin D, were not detectable in non-patterned cells.
The team concluded that micropatterning, in combination with computational analysis, provides a powerful tool to detect subtle changes in steady-state endomembranous organisation.
Cytoo presented the results of the study in an 'Advances in Assay Technology' poster session at the recent Society for Biomolecular Sciences Conference in Arizona, which was held on 11-15 April 2010, showing that the effects of blebbistatin (a model drug) could be detected at a concentration rate 500 times lower than had previously been used while analysing 10 times fewer cells.
The study was conducted using a straightforward analysis algorithm on the company's L adhesive micropatterns.
