By Josh Eckman, CEO, Carterra
At Carterra, we are excited and honored to be at the forefront of the biotherapeutics revolution. Our technology has enabled biotherapeutics to be developed at a breakneck pace, including recent customers who brought COVID-19 therapies to the clinic in 90 days. High-throughput Surface Plasmon Resonance (HT-SPR) from Carterra is instrumental in not only saving time, but also in reducing costs via improved decision making, leveling the playing field between small startups and established pharmaceutical companies. Our vision is that this improved efficiency and competition will drive down the costs of biotherapeutics, making these life-saving medicines more widely available to developing countries.
With more than 5,000 human diseases without a cure, we strive to enable better decision making early in the drug discovery process. To do so, we developed our LSA instrument, which combines high-throughput microfluidics for array printing with gold standard, label-free SPR detection. Through high-resolution and high-throughput LSA binding analysis, detailed interrogation of protein binding and epitope becomes a reality at speeds never seen before. Months of work can be completed in days, enabling better science for improved health outcomes.
What lies ahead for this exciting technology? The integration of artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) into HT-SPR will be a game-changer in the coming years. We have already seen customers harness AI/ML to augment parallelization of HT-SPR applications, further improving the speed and efficiency of binding analysis and characterization. As more high-resolution data is fed back into the algorithms, AI/ML models will become even more powerful, allowing therapies to be designed even more rapidly.
Beyond biologics, we have customers in small molecule drug discovery utilizing HT-SPR technology to screen DNA-encoded libraries (DELs) and in Targeted Protein Degradation (TPD) workflows. The LSA’s capacity for multiplexing and low sample usage is a perfect combination for these drug discovery applications.