Professor Malcolm Clench and the CMSI/BMRC/SHU team are part of a CRACKIT Solutions consortium comprising Phenotox Ltd, Reterogenix Ltd, Sheffield Hallam University and Biogen.

The proposed solution is for comprehensive target screening by label-free cell microarray profiling to reduce animal efficacy and toxicology studies in drug discovery. It is based on Retrogenix’s cell microarray platform in which thousands of protein targets are expressed in human cells.  This is currently used by industry to determine the interaction profile of radio-labelled small molecule drugs. However, the requirement of radio-label limits the application of the approach. The consortium have developed a novel mass spectrometry-based method which detects the binding of label-free (unmodified) chemicals to targets expressed in the cell microarray format.

The award of £30,000 is to enable the consortium to carry out further testing of the platform and seek funding partners.