UPM Biomedicals Combines its Expertise with PerkinElmer's Cell Imaging and Automation Capabilities

The collaboration between UPM Biomedicals and PerkinElmer will offer high throughput 3D cell screening solution for early drug development.

FREMONT, CA: Healthcare distributors are the lifeline of the healthcare industry, connecting pharmaceutical manufacturers with thousands of pharmacies, hospitals, healthcare facilities, and other care settings. PerkinElmer Health Sciences, Inc. has agreed to operate as a distributor for UPM Biomedicals' GrowDex® and GrowDaseTM product lines. PerkinElmer's cell imaging and automation systems and knowledge will be combined with UPM's animal-free 3D reagent offerings and expertise to provide researchers with a complete solution for high throughput screening (HTS) of 3D cell cultures in early drug development.

Johana Kuncova-Kallio, Director at UPM Biomedicals, comments, “This solution brings together the instrument, software and cell culture matrices to make life easier for researchers, providing a high level of consistency between experiments. It will be exciting to see how this collaboration will help advance research and speed up the drug development process. Together with PerkinElmer, we have ensured that the products are ready to ship immediately.”

Automated HTS is routinely used to evaluate the therapeutic potential of hundreds of candidate medications simultaneously. 

The rise of 3D cell culture technologies has created a demand for new high-quality reagents suitable for HTS applications like cancer drug screening. UPM's nanofibrillar cellulose GrowDex hydrogels mimic the conditions within the human body and can be handled well at room temperature, making them ideally suited for scale-up and automation without sacrificing performance. When combined with GrowDase, which allows for successful one-step cell recovery for downstream processing applications, this provides an excellent option for high throughput 3D cell culture applications, allowing for more repeatable and accurate results to forecast how medications will perform in vivo. GrowDex hydrogels are the ideal complement to PerkinElmer's Opera Phenix® Plus automated high-content screening system, which has been successfully used in several notable research projects, including automated drug sensitivity and resistance testing patient-derived cells for personalized cancer treatment research.

“Establishing the physiological relevance of potential therapeutic approaches earlier in the research cycle is crucial to advancing drug discovery, and to reducing clinical trial failure rates. By collaborating with UPM to offer its innovative 3D cell reagents, we are able to expand our offering for 3D cell culture models, further helping researchers get to the critical insights they need faster, to uncover successful drug candidates,” adds Alan Fletcher, Senior Vice President Life Science at PerkinElmer.