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company
spotlight
Caliper's Kevin Hrusovsky
Bridging the in vitro and in vivo Worlds
Malorye A. Branca
"The situation has reached mission critical," says Caliper Life
Sciences' CEO Kevin Hrusovsky. "Pharma is going through incredible
pain, and we think we can help." The Hopkinton Mass.-based tool company
started out with that same goal, but through a different mission, as
pioneers in laboratory robotics. "We thought we could revolutionize the
world with brute force," Hrusovsky says.
While the genomics revolution delivered some
fundamental changes, it did not bring hoped-for relief to Pharma. Now,
Caliper aims to help change that by retooling its own business model and
making some pivotal acquisitions, including NovaScreen in 2005 and Xenogen
in 2006.
The problem is, "biology is
complex," Hrusovsky explains. Things can be automated, but efficiency
does not necessarily lead to success.
In high-throughput screening of kinase
inhibitors, for example, "Out of one million compounds, 10% may cause
fluorescent interference," he explains. That translates to tens of
thousands of false positives at a huge cost and increases the failure rate.
"Our LabChip 3000 microfluidic platform generates virtually no false
positives," he says. "We've made in vitro much better, now we're
building a bridge from there through in vivo studies." (See Pharma DD
Sept./Oct., "The Development of Biomarkers to Bridge Preclinical and
Clinical Studies.")
The company's acquisition of Xenogen, with
its proprietary bioluminescent imaging system, is already transforming
animal studies in oncology (See Pharma DD May/June, "Proof of
Concept"), and promises to have much broader impact as it percolates
into other fields. But Hrusovsky has a much bolder vision than just making
animal models more dependable. "We see huge opportunities in
fluorescent-guided surgery, combining luminescence and improved fluorescence
in one instrument [the IVIS Spectrum], adapting instruments for primate
studies, and multi-modality imaging," he says.
How will he know when his message has gotten
through? "When clients stop saying 'You've got to be kidding me!'"
Hrusovsky says, half joking. "We still have a lot to do, but this is an
organization with a clear vision, and everyone here has a stake in the
future we're building."
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