Caliper Life Sciences Introduces Drug Combination Services to Identify Synergistic Response of Compounds

Caliper Life Sciences, Inc. today launched drug combination services through Caliper Discovery Alliances & Services (CDAS). These new services will help researchers determine the efficacy of combination drug therapies and identify potentially harmful combinations before therapies enter clinical trials. Studies, performed in Caliper’s anti-cancer cell proliferation panel, cellular cytokine/chemokine release assays or using in vivo efficacy models, will help identify synergistic responses of drug combinations and eliminate antagonistic mixtures of drugs.

Drug combination studies are increasingly valuable to pre-clinical pharmaceutical research. The simultaneous use of a variety of drugs is common today for the treatment of bacterial infections, HIV, hypertension and cancer. Drug combination testing is subsequently a growing trend in many areas including oncology. If a combination is synergistic, lower doses can be used to achieve the same or better efficacy, which can lead to lower toxicity and safer patient care.

“Drug combination studies using cancer cell lines create a relationship between in vitro screening and profiling, and in vivo animal models. This connection is critical as researchers strive to understand how drug combinations may react in humans,” said Kevin Hrusovsky, President and CEO, Caliper Life Sciences. “The exact same cell lines used in the in vitro drug combination testing can be used to create in vivo tumor models to further assess efficacy using the IVIS imaging platform.”

The CDAS drug combination studies combine the liquid-handling, automation and imaging elements of Caliper’s business. Drug combination studies can show whether chemical entities improve the efficacy of existing standard care treatments, providing a possible catalyst to FDA approval and market adoption. Testing combinations in vitro and in vivo also ensures that new clinical compounds will not decrease the effectiveness of standard therapy, thereby avoiding potentially harmful consequences for human study subjects. Drug combination studies also allow clinicians to better optimize the doses used in clinical trials as well.