The High Peak site, located in the heart of the UK’s Peak District area, was founded as Retrogenix in 2008 and were acquired by Charles River Laboratories to expand the Discovery and Safety portfolios in 2021

 

They are a specialist biotechnology site with proprietary Cell Microarray Technology. Their bespoke platform provides unique receptor ID/off-target screening services to accelerate, inform, and improve the safety of the discovery and pre-clinical development process for clients. The team are proud to be recognised as leading technology within the biotherapeutic field.

Identifying precisely how a biological or chemical entity interacts with the human cell is fundamental to furthering our understanding of both normal biological and disease processes as well as revealing the mechanism of action of drugs and their potential for toxicity. The Retrogenix Cell Microarray Technology provides a fast, accurate and effective solution for discovering the human cell surface and secreted protein targets of antibodies, proteins, viruses and small molecules.

 

This allows our global pharmaceutical clients to:

• overcome the critical deconvolution step in phenotypic drug discovery

• uncover novel, high quality and exploitable drug targets

• explore safety liabilities of lead candidates using the most comprehensive human expressed off-target system

 

This biologically-relevant system detects specific interactions with a high degree of sensitivity. This unique tool uses proprietary arrays of expression vectors – encoding over 6,300 full-length human plasma membrane and tethered secreted proteins – spotted onto slides. Human cells grown over the top become reverse-transfected resulting in cell surface expression of each respective protein at distinct slide locations. The test molecule is applied, and specific binding analysed and confirmed using an appropriate detection system.