Getting a Lot More Done... with Less

Chris Silva
Vice President, Marketing

In each issue, a member of the executive team is invited to communicate with our readers, and I am pleased to be contributing to the January 2009 issue of Interactions.

First, I want to thank all our customers and users of the Octet® platform for supporting us through 2008. At ForteBio, we experienced significant growth during 2008, above and beyond our peers. This enabled us to build a great company that can fund development programs to further enhance our capabilities. Also, during this past year, we expanded our sales and support footprint by hiring employees in Europe, and by placing instruments with our distributors and/or customers in Japan, China, Australia, and India.

One might ask why specifically were we successful during 2008. To me, the answer lies in our Octet platform’s unique ability to dramatically increase productivity in the lab. For example, consider a traditional ELISA assay that is run to determine antibody titers for clone selection in biotherapeutic development. Our customers have shown greater than 10X savings in hands-on time and turnaround time.

With label-free Octet assays, there are no fluorophore or chromophore conjugation steps, thereby eliminating many of the incubation steps and completely eliminating the need to wash microplate wells. The time to result for a typical quantitation assay on an Octet instrument is 30 minutes for a 96-well plate. Further, similar productivity improvements are also available for customers running kinetic characterization studies (kobs, ka, kd, KD) and are discussed on our web site.

Looking at 2009, I feel the Octet platform’s capabilities are going to be even more important in enabling scientists to get more done with less. It is likely that your lab needs to run the same number of assays—or more—with a smaller budget than in 2008. The Octet platform can help accomplish just that. I wish all of our customers and strategic partners’ success in achieving their 2009 goals, and look forward to expanding the ForteBio toolset of offerings during the coming year.