Eli Lilly and HistoRx enter into research collaboration

The collaboration calls for the use of the Aqua platform to generate in situ proteomic information to elucidate different aspects of Lilly’s drug discovery and development pathway. Terms of the collaboration were not disclosed.

The Aqua platform represents the first integrated automated fluorescence-based imaging platform to identify and quantitate tissue biomarkers in high throughput tissue microarray format or in whole tissue slices. The platform simultaneously measures changes in expression levels of multiple protein biomarkers at the subcellular level while maintaining the spatial relationship between the targets of interest.

Dr Robert Curtis, president and CEO of HistoRx, said: “The information afforded by the Aqua system allows greater insight into the role of protein expression in disease and how it will affect patient stratification and drug targeting, moving us closer to a new era of personalized, molecular medicine.”

Dr Curtis also noted that the importance of understanding where in a specific sub-cellular compartment a particular protein is expressed, in addition to just merely knowing the protein’s level of expression, is beginning to build momentum in the scientific community as a key driver for understanding disease.