Thermo to Provide Cryo-TEM Services for NovAliX’s Laboratory

On Feb. 27, 2017, Thermo Fisher Scientific announced that the company will provide high-resolution cryo-transmission electron microscopy (cryo-TEM) for NovAliX’s new contract research laboratory. The facility will provide services for small-molecule and biologic drug discovery.

NovAliX’s new laboratory will use the cryo-TEM to provide two-dimensional and three-dimensional characterization of small-molecule and biological samples. In a press announcement, Thermo said that NovAliX has completed its first program with a Japanese pharmaceutical customer. The company has multiple projects planned with additional customers.

“Cryo-TEM has great potential in drug discovery applications; it is highly complementary to traditional methods, such as x-ray crystallography, and nuclear magnetic resonance,” said Denis Zeyer, CEO, NovAliX in a statement. “For small-molecules research, cryo-TEM provides structural information about multi-protein complexes or membrane proteins. For biologics, cryo-TEM can deliver critical information about antibody selection, epitope mapping, and formulation. This information helps the drug discovery process to become more consistent and reproducible, which may ultimately result in better therapeutic candidates.”

NovAliX’s new laboratory also includes x-ray diffraction, nuclear magnetic resonance, micro-array surface plasmon resonance, and other technologies. The addition of cryo-TEM enables NovAliX to resolve features in biological molecules, sufficient to reveal tertiary and quaternary protein structure and, in some cases, to identify individual amino acid side chains. It can look at molecules and molecular complexes of any size, without crystallization. Equally important, cryo-TEM samples, which are frozen in vitreous (non-crystalline) ice, can be examined in a near-native, fully-hydrated state. Cryo-TEM has proven to be complementary to nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy and x-ray diffraction as researchers have used computational techniques to fit their atomic-scale information into cryo-TEM 3D models.

Source: Thermo Fisher Scientific