End of Year News for 2019
December 20, 2019
R&D News
Already a tradition at Solvo, the turn of the year once again witnesses a burst of new launches and development releases. Whilst some of our recent cell lines simply introduce a new mammalian ortholog of a well-known transporter, as is the case with HEK293-ratNtcp, others steer farther away from classical drug transporters to visit previously uncovered areas of hormone and nutrient transport. The addition of the thyroid hormone transporters MCT8 and MCT10 to our portfolio reflects a growing awareness in the chemical industry of the potential harm from unwanted interference with thyroid hormone homeostasis. LAT1, a transporter of large neutral amino acids and essential drugs such as L-DOPA, is now also available for study in overexpressing HEK293 cells. LAT1 is receiving increasing attention both as a potential mediator of drug-drug interactions (DDIs) and as a target in cancer therapy due to its upregulation in tumors.
We have continued to adapt our existing transporter models for use with endogenous and clinically relevant substrates. Our probe substrate repertoire has been extended with coproporphyrin I and rosuvastatin for OATP1B1 and OATP1B3, sumatriptan for OCT1, and quinidine for the MDCKII-MDR1 monolayer system in this spirit. Other pre-existing models have been brushed up for optimized performance: the OATP2B1 transporter is now expressed in HEK293 cells instead of MDCKII for better comparability with our other OATP models, and the old CHO- or MDCKII-based OAT1, OAT3, OCT1, OCT2, OATP2B1, and NTCPcell lines have been phased out in favor of HEK293-based ones in the Predicell kits.
In the ongoing process of finetuning our in vitro predictions to clinical DDI outcomes we have now completed the calibration of OATP1B1 and OATP1B3 uptake inhibition assays, and calibration of other uptake transporter assays is in progress. Last, but not least, this year we have finally embarked on the long journey of automating our service procedures, starting with the BSEP vesicular transport assay that is now fully set up for robotic execution.
SOLVO Meet the Experts: Anniversary Symposium: Celebrating 20 Years of Innovation in Transporters
It is our honor to invite you to attend the SOLVO Meet the Experts anniversary symposium: Celebrating 20 years of innovation in transporters which will be held in Budapest, Hungary on April 2-3, 2020. We will also be offering a one-day training course on applications of transporter methodology at our new Budapest lab facility on April 1st, 2020. Not only will this be the 11th Meet the Experts (MEEX) Transporter symposium, but it will also mark SOLVO’s 20th anniversary. It has been an exciting journey advancing the science of transporters over the past 20 years for us, and our MEEX symposia have served to increase awareness and cultivate collaboration and dialog among our diverse scientific community. After successful international meetings in San Francisco, Tokyo, Boston and Seoul, the venue of the 11th MEEX will be the beautiful and historic city of Budapest.
Our confirmed speakers:
• Brown, Colin, NewCells, Newcastle, GBR
• El-Kattan, Ayman, IFM Therapeutics, Cambridge, USA
• Fischer, David, CRL, Chesterford, GBR
• Gaborik, Zsuzsanna, SOLVO, a CR Co, Budapest, HUN
• Hilgendorf, Constanze, Astra Zeneca, Moelndal, SWE
• Huth, Felix, Novartis, Basel, CH
• Keppler, Dietrich, DKFZ, Heidelberg, GER
• Kis, Emese, SOLVO, a CR Co, Szeged, HUN
• Marin, Jose, Univ. Salamanca, Salamanca, ESP
• Masereeuw, Roos, Univ. Utrecht, Utrecht, NED
• Montana, John, CRL, Chesterford, GBR
• Oswald, Stefan, Univ. Greifswald, Greifswald, GER
• Paine, Mary, Univ. Washington, Seattle, USA
• Reboul, Emmanuelle, Univ. Marseille, Marseille, FRA
• Sarkadi, Balazs, HAS, Budapest, HUN
• Sugiyama, Yuichi, RIKEN, Yokohama, JPN
• Tatrai, Peter, SOLVO, a CR Co, Budapest, HUN
• Terasaki, Tetsuya, Tohoku Univ., Tohoku, JPN
• Unadkat, Jash, Univ. Washington, Seattle, USA
• Varadi, András, HAS, Budapest, HU
Meet the Experts: Transporter Conference Boston 2019
The 9th conference in the Meet the Experts series was held in the biotech heart of Kendall Square in Cambridge, MA on September 3-5, 2019. We were very privileged to have so many key opinion leaders from the field of drug transport and metabolism speak and participate at the event, which for the first time at our North American event also included several poster presentations. The main meeting was prefaced by a one-day workshop in which SOLVO scientists provided more practical advice and guidance for those carrying out, or planning to conduct transporter studies. This was then followed by 2 days of talks on a range of topics, including: variability in oral drug exposure and formulation strategies, the gut-brain-microbiome axis, selection of an optimal in vitro assay and clinical probe substrate to assess P-glycoprotein inhibition, ADME biomarkers of drug-drug interactions, emerging in vitro kidney models, transporter-enzyme interplay in hepatic clearance, structure-based ligand discovery for human nutrient transporters, blood-brain barrier transporters in ischemic stroke, and organoids for modeling the blood brain barrier.
We were delighted to see that attendee feedback from the event was very positive, and in particular highlighted both the scientific content of the talks and also the quality of discussions following each presentation. We would like to thank our colleagues at DILIsym Services, A Simulations Plus Company for their generous sponsorship and support of this event.
Meet the Experts: Transporter Conference Seoul 2019
It has been our pleasure to fulfil the request of our valued Partners in South Korea to hold the 10th Meet the Experts Transporter Conference in Seoul.
The interest both from industry and academia was so intense that we needed to close the registration some time before the meeting as we reached the meeting room’s maximum capacity. It was a one-day program with prominent speakers not only from Korea, Japan and China but also from the US and Europe. The talks covered some of the most recent findings on the fields of Drug Discovery and Development, Barriers and Transporters, Transport and Metabolism. Each talk was followed by lively and thought-provoking discussion. We received positive feedback from the participants about the venue and the scientific value of the meeting happily. We appreciate the participation of all attendees and the help of all contributors, also thankful for our Partner, Newcells Biotech for their sponsorship.
We hope to schedule one of our upcoming meetings with more cutting-edge transporter and metabolism science talks to Seoul again, please stay tuned and don’t miss the opportunity, we look forward to seeing you there.
Looking back: 2019 Webinars
One of SOLVO’s commitments to excellence is to continually broaden our understanding of transporters and to share that knowledge with you through a variety of means, including our interactive webinar sessions. We kicked off the year in January with a summary of the 2018 International Transporter Consortium Meeting highlights regarding clinically-relevant transporters, clinical probes, and DDI evaluations, presented by Dr. Maciej Zamek-Gliszczynski. In February, Dr. Manthena Varma summarized recent studies on the role of OAT2 in hepatic clearance of anionic/zwitterionic molecules and how to leverage that information in clearance optimization and drug development. Our July program featured Dr. Paul Michalski, who shared a proof-of-concept study evaluating DILISym as a screening tool for hepatoxicity risk in pre-clinical development. Wrapping up our webinar series this year was our own Dr. Péter Tátrai, who described advantages and disadvantages of various transporter test systems, our efforts to validate monolayer assays for more reliable DDI predictions, and the importance of uptake transporter preincubation in determining physiologically-relevant IC50 values. If you missed any of these presentations, or wish to see them again, visit the Knowledge Center on our website to watch the recordings. Your suggestions on topics of interest for future programs are always welcome! Send your submissions to .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address).
SOLVO wishes you a Happy Holiday Season and Successful New Year!
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