Octet in the News at Recent Conferences

Sriram Kumaraswamy, Product Manager

With a rapidly growing customer base, Octet systems and related products are finding ever greater use in academic and pharmaceutical research. The growth in Octet use is reflected in the flurry of recent publications, patent applications and conference presentations around the world. ForteBio is also actively engaged in meeting researchers involved in drug discovery and protein research at various conference venues and promoting discussion of the utility of the Octet platform in their daily work.

At Screening Europe, held at Barcelona in February, Genmab’s Arnout Gerritsen presented a poster discussing the success they have achieved in increasing the throughput of label-free assays and in accommodating more projects for antibody discovery by integrating the Octet RED384 system with the Tecan Freedom EVO robotic workstation and IDBS’s ActivityBase data management suite. On a related note, read Kevin Moore’s description of the partnership between ForteBio and Tecan in this issue of Interactions. More information on automation of the Octet platform is available at www.fortebio.com/ automation.html.

At the SBS conference, held in Phoenix in April, ForteBio conducted a workshop on the use of the Octet RED384 system for small molecule and fragment screening. The workshop was presented by John Wang, an expert researcher in small molecule and protein drug discovery and until recently, an Octet user at Novartis. He talked about the higher throughput, greater ease-of-use and faster time-to-results achieved on the Octet RED384 for screening small molecule and fragment compound libraries to identify lead candidates. Roche Discovery Technologies presented a poster at the conference reporting their use of the Octet RED384 system, integrated with a Hudson PlateCrane workstation and a Multidrop liquid dispensing station, in a fragment screening campaign with a kinase that contains a known allosteric binding site. Please download a copy of the poster from our website. I presented a poster on the screening of a 500 compound Maybridge library against Carbonic Anhydrase II (work performed by Charles Wartchow et al. of ForteBio).

ForteBio conducted a successful workshop at AAPS National Biotechnology conference, held in San Francisco in May. The workshop was moderated by Laura Lerner, Director, Protein Science at Macrogenics and the seminars consisted of a presentation on detection of low affinity anti-drug antibodies and improved drug tolerance in immunogenicity testing by Jian Li of Centocor, ligand binding assays on the Octet platform for bioprocess contaminants by Sae Choo of ForteBio, study of inhibitors of Wnt/LRP6 signaling complex by Eric Bourhis of Genentech and biopharmaceutical production using Pfenex expression technology and high throughput assays on the Octet system by Jeff Allen of Pfenex.
At the Protein Engineering Summit, held in San Diego in May, Yasmina Abdiche discussed the use of the Octet QK384 system at Rinat/Pfizer for affinity screening of crude antibodies, epitope binning and cross-blocking studies. Robin Barbour of Neotope compared the Octet system to other label-free methods.

Readers can download many of the above presentations and much more from Octet customers who presented at various other conferences on ForteBio’s website at www.fortebio.com/literature.html.