SynScreen Drug Combination Studies

Caliper’s Discovery Alliances & Services division (CDAS) offers drug combination studies to help research scientists at pharmaceutical and biotech companies identify synergistic responses of drug combinations and eliminate antagonistic mixtures of drugs. These studies can be performed in Caliper’s anti-cancer cell proliferation panel, cellular cytokine/chemokine release assays or using in vivo efficacy models.

Drug combination studies are increasingly valuable to pre-clinical pharmaceutical research. The simultaneous use of a variety of drugs is common today for the treatment of bacterial infections, HIV, hypertension and cancer. Drug combination testing is subsequently a growing trend in the oncology therapeutic area. If a combination is synergistic or additive, lower doses can be used to achieve the same or better efficacy with lower toxicity.

Drug combination studies using cancer cell lines provide a direct link from in vitro screening and profiling to in vivo animal models. The exact same cell lines used in the in vitro drug combination testing can be used to create in vivo tumor models for assessing in vivo efficacy using the IVIS imaging platform.

The CDAS drug combination studies combine the liquid-handling, automation and imaging elements of Caliper’s business to examine drug-drug interactions in a more sophisticated oncology setting, ultimately measuring the growth of cancer cell lines. Drug combination studies can show whether chemical entities actually improve the efficacy of existing standard care treatments, providing a possible catalyst to FDA approval and market adoption. Testing combinations in vitro and in vivo can help confirm that new clinical compounds will not decrease the effectiveness of standard therapy, thereby avoiding potentially harmful consequences for human study subjects. Drug combination studies allow clinicians to better optimize the doses used in clinical trials as well.