Industrial partnership for the design of novel commercializable high-throughput screening cell-based assays

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PerkinElmer, Inc. is a worldwide leader in the development of research equipment in human and environmental health with a R&D division in Woodbridge, Ontario. Recently, PerkinElmer, Inc. elaborated a new generation of research tools enabling to quantify subtle changes in cell morphology using the Label-free technology. This novel approach was shown to be highly relevant in cell-based assays as well as in the identification of signaling pathways. However, there is currently no commercial Label-free application in the area of nutrition and metabolism. Therefore, the company intends to develop novel high-throughput screening cell-based assays to determine nutrient fate in metabolically-relevant organs and tissues. This type of expertise is not presently available in-house at PerkinElmer, Inc. To circumvent this, the company has initiated a new partnership with David H St-Pierre, a young investigator who has recently established cellular models for investigating the effects of bioactive products in the early steps leading to excessive lipid infiltration in liver and skeletal muscle. Although these models have proven to be highly relevant, their utility is currently limited by the extensive human resources they require. This is mainly caused by the lack of appropriate high-throughput screening tools available to study the interaction between factors promoting or preventing the excessive deposition of fat in cells. This partnership between David H St-Pierre's research group and PerkinElmer therefore intends to use well- established models to develop bioassays to characterize the effects of single and/or combined forms of lipid species in hepatocytes and undifferentiated skeletal myocytes. On the long run, these assays will also allow defining the impact of other types of nutrients and other factors on the excessive accumulation of lipids in a wide range of cellular models derived from different non- or metabolically relevant organs and tissues. A better understanding of mechanisms underlying the regulation of nutrient storage and metabolism can be applied to a host of applications such as human and animal health as well as meat production in agriculture.