Microfluidizer Processor Helps Increase The Odds Of Drug Discovery At Tularik

It's been said that to make an omelet, you have to break a few eggs, and the same can be said for genetically engineered pharmaceuticals. The difference is that, in the pharmaceutical business, the eggs are the bacterium Escherichia coli (E. coli), used as hosts to grow recombinant proteins that are naturally used by pathogenic viruses to reproduce. Find a way to disable the protein, and you may have found a way to disable the virus. You may even have found a cure for a disease like Hepatitis C. But first you have to break open the bacteria's "shell" in order to extractthe protein for study. And unlike an egg you'll cook for breakfast, when you break open an E. coli, you don't want to scramble what's inside.

That's why pharmaceutical companies use Microfluidizer technology. It can apply 16,000 psi of steady pressure, break open any number of bacteria in a continuous batch, and yet leave the cell's contents intact for harvesting and research.

Tularik Inc. (South San Francisco, CA) uses the Microfluidizer as a critical part of its protein harvesting operation. The company was recently profiled in the New York Times as representative of a new trend in drug discovery: to perform tests, called assays, that show how target substances, like proteins, respond to different chemical compounds in environments that mimic the conditions of a living cell. Robots are used to assay thousands of different compounds in a few hours. In the case of certain viruses, the target protein is an enzyme necessary for the replicative processes in the virus.