Carterra’s LSA instrument
Live from SLAS 2018
Label-free biosensor company Carterra plans to use the proceeds from the recent closing of a $10M financing from Telegraph Hill Partners to complete development and commercialize the company’s LSA™ instrument, a fully automated, high-throughput monoclonal antibody (mAb) characterization platform based on surface plasmon resonance.
The LSA enables label-free binding experiments to be carried out and to allow high-resolution data to be obtained early in the drug discovery process with minimal sample consumption, according to Yasmina Abdiche, Ph.D., Carterra’s CSO.
“The instrument allows researchers to observe 384 interactions per unit time and only a small sample is needed,” she told GEN at the Society for Laboratory Automation and Screening's SLAS Conference in San Diego. “We’re looking for antibody screening and characterization at the earliest research opportunity where you have many clones and a lower availability of material and you want to extract as much kinetic and epitope information as possible.”
The system’s software permits scientists to not only generate information but to also analyze it quickly to get to affinity and binding kinetic measurements to group antibodies into different epitope groups for mechanism of action studies, she adds.
While the LSA has been developed for any molecular interaction analysis project, Carterra is focusing on therapeutic antibodies.
