Co-marketing agreement set to simplify metabolite analysis

Agilent (California, USA) has formed a co-marketing agreement with Molecular Discovery Ltd (Perugia,
Italy). The agreement will result in the provision of an advanced metabolite-identification platform to researchers, bridging the gap between metabolite analysis software and hardware in research laboratories.

Metabolite analysis using liquid chromatography–mass spectroscopy (LC–MS) is central to the discovery of new drugs, allowing scientists insight into the mechanisms of disease. Many regulatory agencies require that metabolite testing be carried out prior to the initiation of human clinical trials, in order to determine the potential adverse effects of the drug tested on human metabolism. This is considered to be expensive and time-consuming, therefore is generally left until the final stages of preclinical testing. This co-marketing agreement has the potential to reduce the time required for this stage of testing, by combining software and hardware technologies and thereby removing incompatibility issues.

“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, the vice president and general manager of Agilent’s Biological Systems Division. “Together, Agilent Technologies and Molecular Discovery are working to solve this problem in pharmaceutical research. 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.”

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