I’m working on a startup to develop a new pharmaceutical drug, and I need a lab to help with some of the development and testing. I figure the Thinkgene community might be able to help me out. I’m going to be a little sparse on details in the post, but I can give more information to those who ask.
I’m essentially looking for a lab that can perform an assay to screen a range of compounds for their effectiveness at activating a g-protein coupled receptor, preferably a cell based assay that uses cultured cells.
I have a lab that will generate the compounds that I’m interested in testing, but I need a lab to measure their ability to activate various receptors in neurons. Simple assays that just measure the Kd for the compounds and these particular receptors tend to underestimate the actual effectiveness in the studies I’ve read, so I would prefer an assay that measures something downstream of the receptor; hence why I think a cell based assay would be best. I have a few ideas of different approaches to do this, but it would be complicated by the fact that not much seems to be known about the downstream pathway of these receptors.
If a cell based assay is infeasible or unpractical, simply measuring the Kd would probably be sufficient (I have a protocol for this).
Eventually I would need a lab that can do animal studies with mice to test the compounds after the initial screening. So it would be great if the lab has experience with animal testing.
If anyone has lab or knows someone with a lab that would be capable and willing to help with these tests, please either post a comment with your contact information or email me at josh@thinkgene.com