Stanford, Tempus unveil high-throughput screening platforms; plus Blueprint, Editas, Prothena, AlzeCure and more

Technologies developed by Stanford University and Tempus Labs Inc. could speed up enzyme engineering and cancer therapeutics discovery, respectively. In Science, Stanford researchers unveiled a microfluidic platform to screen over 1,000 mutations in an enzyme, simultaneously. The approach is centered on a chip with 1,568 wells, which each contain a mutant enzyme variant that can be assayed against different reactants. The team demonstrated proof of concept by characterizing 1,036 single-site mutations in a well-studied bacterial alkaline phosphatase, and showed 232 of these mutations induced catalytically inactive conformations.

In Cell Reports, Tempus showcased data for its label-free tumor organoid screening platform. The company can conduct high-throughput drug screening on organoids from over 1,000 patients using its neural network- and light microscopy-based cell viability assay, which unlike typical approaches does not require fluorescent labels. In a 351-compound screen in colorectal and gastric tumor organoid lines, the platform predicted fluorescence profiles that correlated with actual fluorescence-based cell viability data with Pearson correlation values of 0.92 and 0.93, respectively. ...