Alliances

PRECOS: Oncology Pharmacology

Our alliance with PRECOS (www.precos.org), a highly-respected CRO based in the UK, allows Argenta's customers to access PRECOS' vast range of models and analyses. PRECOS has had successful collaborations with a number of pharmaceutical and biotech companies in the US, UK, EU and Japan for more than 10 years.

PRECOS has developed unique models which closely resemble the patient condition for each stage of cancer progression, including pre-cancerous lesions, primary tumours and metastasis. They have established orthotopic (pancreas, prostate and bladder) and metastatic (liver, bone and lung) tumour models; subcutaneous tumour models (bladder, brain, breast, colon, colorectal, gastric, hepatoma, haemopoietic, small cell lung, non-small cell lung, melanoma, oesophageal, ovarian, pancreatic and prostate); spontaneous tumour development models; and hypoxia models. PRECOS also performs biodistribution and tumour localisation studies and ex vivo analyses (necrosis, apoptosis, proliferation and angiogenesis).

Porsolt & Partners Pharmacology: CNS/Pain Pharmacology

Our alliance with Porsolt & Partners Pharmacology (www.porsolt.com), a highly-experienced preclinical CRO based in France, allows our customers to access not only Argenta's broad drug discovery experience, but also the extensive CNS and pain pharmacology expertise of Porsolt. Porsolt has been conducting preclinical contract services in efficacy and safety pharmacology for 25 years and has worked with many of the industry's leaders in CNS.

Porsolt has industry-recognized models for a number of CNS indications, including anxiety, depression, schizophrenia, cerebral trauma, stroke, age related memory disorders, Parkinson's disease and migraine. Porsolt also has a wide range of industry-recognized pain models pertinent to inflammatory pain, neuropathic pain, post-operative pain, and visceral pain (IBD, cystitis). In addition, Porsolt is able to perform early safety and toxicology studies (including Irwin and Rotarod assessments).

Essen BioScience: Ion-channel technology

Our alliance with Essen BioScience (www.essenbioscience.com), a well-respected instrumentation and drug discovery services CRO based in the US with labs in the UK, provides our clients with access to state-of-the-art ion channel drug discovery expertise, assays and instruments. Essen has contracted its services to over 20 pharmaceutical, biotech and university partners to develop assay solutions for their ion channel programs. Several of these customers have collaborated on multiple projects and most have formed multi-year relationships.

Essen has assembled a team of senior scientists who have successfully managed and driven drug discovery projects at major pharmaceutical companies. The combination of drug discovery and instrumentation experience makes Essen a unique provider of research tools and services. Products invented by Essen personnel include:

• FLIPR™: the first high-throughput cell-based assay platform,
• IonWorks™: the first high-throughput planar electrophysiology platform on the market, and
• IncuCyte™: the first live-cell imaging system to fit inside a standard cell culture incubator.