Beckman Coulter Signs Distribution Agreement with pION INC for Automated Drug Permeability Analysis

15-Dec-2004

Beckman Coulter, Inc. announced it has entered into a 5-year distribution agreement with pION INC of Woburn, Mass., to deliver a fully validated solution for the automation of in vitro drug permeability measurements. .

"This agreement expands Beckman Coulter's drug discovery automation product offering into in vitro ADMETox drug screening," said Elias Caro, president of Beckman Coulter's Biomedical Research Division. "By providing pharmaceutical customers the ability to identify, early in the drug development process, sets of drug candidates that have the appropriate permeability characteristics, we can help them to streamline the development process and reduce their overall costs."

ADMETox is an acronym for set of analyses that measure the absorption, distribution, metabolism, elimination and toxicity of a drug candidate. An important first step in in vitro ADMETox is the determination of passive absorption of a drug candidate through an artificial lipid membrane, a process referred to as PAMPA (Parallel Artificial Membrane Permeability Analysis). This process can be run using different pH levels, mimicking the conditions throughout the human gastrointestinal tract, the predominant location for drug absorption. The PAMPA system can also be designed to mimic the blood/brain barrier to monitor the absorption of drug candidates into the brain.

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