ChanTest Launches New Business To Provide Validated Ion Channel Expressing Cell Lines To The Research Community

Company expands beyond core business of discovery and safety services to meet the evolving needs of the drug discovery and development community

Boston and Cleveland - ChanTest, the world-leading provider of validated ion channel-expressing cell lines and services for drug-discovery and development applications, will make a selection of its fully validated cell lines available to researchers through a new Web site. ChanTest Founder and CEO Arthur ("Buzz") Brown announced the new business offering today at the Drug Discovery & Development Innovative Technologies conference in Boston. ChanTest's initial launch will be of nine cell lines that the company has validated on the major ion channel platforms, including manual patch clamp, PatchXpress, QPatch, IonWorks, Quattro, and FLIPR-Tetra. Optimization on all platforms is in progress. According to Dr. Brown, the company will expand the number of cell lines available during 2008 to 64.

"As the preeminent ion channel company, our goal is to serve all the ion channel needs of pharmaceutical and biotech customers -- from early functional screens for profiling drug candidates or ranking within profiles during the drug-discovery process -- to a complete set of in vitro GLP service products for cardiac risk assessment," said Dr. Brown. "However, some companies prefer to maintain testing in house. For those customers, we're pleased to offer a new way that researchers can benefit from ChanTest's ion channel expertise and exhaustive study of the characteristics of our ion channel library -- by purchasing our validated cell lines. We want to ensure that all researchers have the best opportunity to identify ion channels as pharmaceutically relevant targets and accelerate work on providing new drugs to those targets."

ChanTest scientists were the first to prove hERG as the target for adverse cardiac events linked to non-cardiac drugs: Seldane (terfenadine), Propulsid (cisapride), and Nizoral (ketoconazole), and ChanTest pioneered the development of functional, cell-based ion channel testing as a means to predict cardiac side effects produced by non-cardiac drugs. Such testing is now a standard component of regulatory submissions prior to the approval of drugs for use in humans. ChanTest is committed to innovation, and is leading the next major advance in ion channel research and services with a $10 million program to develop the world's most extensive library or catalog of ion channels. ChanTest's expert electrophysiologists fully validate the ion channels for interrogation with functional, pharmacological, and biochemical assays.

About ChanTest
The preeminent ion channel services company, ChanTest serves its drug discovery and development customers with GLP safety and automated screening assays using its library of ion channel-expressing cell lines -- the most comprehensive in the world. Since its inception in 1998, ChanTest has tested some 20,000 compounds for approximately 400 global pharmaceutical and biotech companies -- helping them to achieve their drug safety and discovery goals. ChanTest works in partnership with customers to speed the drug-development process, save time and money, and ultimately -- to help make better, safer drugs. The company also offers a selection of its validated cell lines directly to customers for use in their internal research. Because of ChanTest's seminal role in this field, along with the company's uncompromising commitment to quality, ChanTest was named "most trusted fee-for-service provider" for ion channel screening in the HTStec Ion Channel Trends Survey for two years in a row. ChanTest is based in Cleveland, Ohio.

SOURCE: ChanTest