Discovering New Drugs on the Cellular Level

About this technology

Overview

From 1993 to 1997, Biolog received Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) contracts work with NASA in developing two technologies that are now in use by Biolog customers worldwide. The first technology, based on the company's pre-existing assay kits, was a process created to monitor populations of microbes. NASA was interested in using this process as a way of monitoring the health of hydroponic crops that would be grown in space during future manned missions to Mars. The second technology was an instrumented system that would allow automated monitoring of Biolog's assay kits for NASA's purposes. Together, these innovations intended to provide NASA with better means of growing food in space and avoiding a catastrophic crop failure during long-term space travel. Biolog went on to extend the technologies it developed with the SBIR assistance to bring two novel and important cell-testing technologies to market: the Phenotype MicroArray and the OmniLog System. Biolog's Phenotype MicroArray technology is complementary to DNA microarrays and proteomic technologies, which allow scientists to detect changes in levels of genes or proteins that direct most cellular functions. In the field of drug discovery, it allows researchers to obtain a comprehensive picture of a drug's effect on a specific cell. Incubation and recording of phenotypic data gathered from the Phenotype MicroArray are performed by the OmniLog PM System, an integrated system of cellular assays, instrumentation, and bioinformatics software. Just as it automatically monitored assay kits for NASA, the OmniLog technology monitors thousands of phenotypes simultaneously. Another version of the OmniLog product, called the OmniLog ID System, can be paired with Biolog's microbial-identification kits to easily and efficiently identify over 2,000 species of aerobic and anaerobic bacteria, yeasts, and fungi.