By Elainna Ciaramella
Biotherapeutic drug discovery is typically complex, time-consuming, and expensive. But new technology from Carterra, a biotech company based in Salt Lake City, enables the months-long intensive drug discovery process to be completed in just days.
Formerly Wasatch Microfluidics, Carterra’s technology enables much larger experiments to be conducted with lower sample requirements than was previously possible, enabling biopharma researchers to receive high-quality information earlier and make better decisions sooner.
Josh Eckman, Carterra’s CEO, says the company’s LSA platform can generate 100X the data in 10 percent of the time and with 1 percent of the sample requirements and consumable costs of other systems. The platform was used during the pandemic by various industry and academic labs and the world’s first Covid therapeutic was enabled by Carterra’s technologies, he says.
In 2021, Eli Lilly and AbCellera used the Carterra LSA for antibody screening and characterization while looking for a COVID therapeutic. Because of LSA’s ability to produce huge amounts of data and high resolution so quickly, they were able to identify a candidate target—including backup antibody candidates—and find a therapeutic that could be passed on to clinical trials in only 90 days.