IntelliCyt introduces FlowTox™ Screening with HyperCyt® at Society of Toxicology

Albuquerque, NM, March 11, 2009 – IntelliCyt Corporation, a life science technology company focused on innovative high-throughput cell-based screening products for drug discovery and life science research, introduces FlowTox™ Screening with HyperCyt® at the 48th Annual Meeting of the Society of Toxicology in Baltimore, MD.

FlowTox Screening, a powerful new HyperCyt application, addresses the growing need to investigate cytotoxic effects of compounds, biotherapeutic agents, or metabolites of drugs on primary cells such as bone marrow cells or peripheral blood cells. FlowTox Screening with HyperCyt enables researchers to perform cytotoxicity screening with the most widely used technology for cell analysis—flow cytometry. Flow cytometry systems have been the utilized extensively in studies of blood and bone marrow. Modern flow cytometers can measure 6 or more fluorescent markers per cell, making them the most powerful and sensitive technology for making multiplex measurements of cells in suspension. However, until the introduction of the HyperCyt system, flow cytometers have not had the sample throughput to perform large scale cytotoxicity screening.

The HyperCyt system allows researchers to analyze complex cell suspensions prepared in 96- or 384-well microplates at rates up to 40 wells per minute—a 96-well plate can be analyzed in 2½ minutes and a 384-well plate in 10 minutes. HyperCyt rapidly introduces microplate-based samples to the flow cytometer and then analyzes the resulting data quickly and efficiently. HyperCyt provides significant cost savings, since the system can be integrated with existing flow cytometers. In addition to savings in equipment utilization, HyperCyt technology reduces sample and reagent requirements by 50-90%, making it feasible to perform screening campaigns with fewer cells and less reagents per well while taking advantage of the dynamic range and multicolor capabilities of the flow cytometer.