· Customer Testimonial

Accelerating RNA therapeutics research with high throughput screening

Oligonucleotides have the potential to transform the treatment of a wide range of diseases, and have extensive applications in biomedical research. Oligonucleotide approaches include antisense oligonucleotides (ASOs), RNA interference (RNAi) and aptamers. TychoBio – an RNA therapeutics start-up located in Villejuif, Île-de-France – screens candidate oligonucleotide therapeutics across multiple cell lines to generate large datasets that can help to improve our understanding of RNA regulation and inform the design of better, safer and more efficient RNA therapies. The TychoBio team relies on various products from INTEGRA Biosciences, including the VACUSAFE safe aspiration system and SWITCH hybrid pipette to perform this vital research, improving throughput and saving time.

A data-driven approach to RNA therapeutics

The core of TychoBio’s work is high throughput screening of oligonucleotide therapeutics. The team looks at a wide range of different molecules, as Chief Scientific Officer Mathurin Dorel explained: “We screen lots of oligonucleotides: some are candidate therapeutics, while others are just designed to gain information into how RNA is regulated. The goal is to build a model that understands RNA regulation and can help us to design better, safer and more efficient RNA therapies.”

RNA therapeutics are an important frontier for drug development, as they can intervene earlier in the biological process than most conventional small molecule and biologics approaches, which target proteins. “There are several advantages to this approach,” Mathurin explained. “It has all the advantages of small molecules, such as reversibility, but it’s easier to design a sequence for a specific target, and has the potential for longer-lasting benefits.” Despite the possibilities for RNA therapeutics, further research into basic RNA biology, toxicity and efficacy is still needed. “The devil is in the details, and this is why we use a high throughput, machine learning-based approach. The sequence of an RNA molecule is not the whole story: it folds in the cell, and it interacts with different things. We need to find out what happens during these interactions to anticipate if there is any possible toxicity, and to ensure the safety of candidate therapeutics.”

Photo courtesy of TychoBio France
Photo courtesy of TychoBio France

Removing bottlenecks during cell culture

Working with high throughput assays means that the company spends a significant amount of time performing basic cell culture tasks. “We use INTEGRA’s VACUSAFE safe aspiration system to speed up routine processes, including removing media and washing of cells. Although these processes seem small at first, they can be very time consuming when working on high throughput projects. If you are working with five or six plates at a time, the VACUSAFE is a really convenient way to get rid of all the liquids from a 96 well plate rapidly. Without it, we’d be doing the task by hand with a multichannel pipette, so it probably saves each of us at least 30 minutes a day. This gives us more time to generate the huge datasets needed for our machine learning algorithms.”

 

Rate this article

CAPTCHA