Alliance Addresses Complex Problems in Drug Research

Agilent Technologies Inc. and Molecular Discovery Ltd, are co-marketing the combined assets of Agilent’s high-resolution liquid chromatography/mass spectrometry (LC/MS) technology and Molecular Discovery’s Mass-MetaSite software to enable superior identification and analysis of complex biological mixtures.

“Until now, the challenges of identifying and predicting human drug metabolism have been major obstacles in the development of safe, effective drug candidates,” said Gus Salem, vice president and general manager of Agilent’s Biological Systems Division. “Whereas traditional metabolite identification, synthesis and toxicity testing has been costly and time consuming for researchers, our combined industry-leading technologies will now give them faster, more accurate data, and the confidence they need to ensure the safety of their products much earlier in the preclinical phase of development.

“For example,” Salem continued, “the Agilent RapidFire 360 product is used to increase sample throughput for pharmaceutical discovery. With Molecular Discovery’s expertise in xenobiotic metabolism and predictive software, the analytical interpretation burden is dramatically reduced. This allows researchers to process the majority of their results automatically and focus their expertise on the more complex cases, streamlining data processing and metabolite identification.”

Gabriele Cruciani, managing director at Molecular Discovery, added, “Agilent’s leading LC/MS platform is enabling companies to obtain high-quality analytical data with a much higher throughput than before. This means that the experts now need to interpret even more data. Working together with Agilent, we are seamlessly combining these high-throughput hardware capabilities with Molecular Discovery’s high-throughput software capabilities, providing a revolutionary advanced metabolite identification platform.”