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Genetic Engineering & Biotechnology News | GENengnews.com | SEPTEMBER 1, 2016 | 15 "Although the thermal shift assay could be very powerful, it has a drawback," admits Dr. Stokoe. "With this approach, a negative piece of information is not informative. If a shift is not seen after a compound is added to a cell, this does not conclusively indicate the compound is not binding." Recent years have witnessed the emer- gence of additional experimental strategies for protein profiling. "There is a lot of excite- ment about protein activity profiling, where instead of looking at protein abundance one actually interrogates protein activities," elab- orates Dr. Stokoe. Protein activity profiling, which can globally characterize the activity of enzymes in their native environment, re- lies on the use of a probe that binds the ac- tive site of an enzyme, and has been success- fully used for enzymes that can be covalently labeled. "This strategy has been used for phos- phatases, deubiquitinases, and other pro- teins with an available cysteine molecule," notes Dr. Stokoe. "It will be an emerging area as we move forward." Another promis- ing strategy for protein profiling is chemical proteomics. With this strategy, a functional group is attached to a small molecule, and then the proteins that it binds to are inter- rogated. Copyright Cisbio Bioassays. All rights reserved. All trademarks are property of Cisbio Bioassays. The study of promising therapeutic targets such as GPCRs, kinases, epigenetics, and protein-protein interactions continue to reveal complex biological functions. As we celebrate 20 years of pioneering the TR-FRET field with HTRF, we're ready to support the next chapter of your drug discovery research. Screen Smarter getyourguide.htrf.com BE PART OF THE SCREENING SUCCESS STORY. WE WROTE THE BOOK ON HTRF DRUG DISCOVERY > Inovio Goes It Alone on Hep B Immunotherapy Vaccine as Roche Collab Ends Inovio Pharmaceuticals will go it alone in continuing to develop its hepatitis B DNA immunotherapy vac- cine candidate, INO-1800, after Roche pulled out of a nearly three-year col- laboration with the biotech. Inovio said it received notice from Roche that it was ending the com- panies' collaboration on INO-1800, which is the subject of a Phase I study and returning to Inovio its rights to the immunotherapy—including rights to license the product to other companies. > Regeneron, Adicet Partner to Research Engineered Immune-Cell Therapeutics Regeneron Pharmaceuticals and Adicet Bio agreed to partner to de- velop next-generation engineered immune-cell therapeutics through a collaboration that will generate $25 million upfront for Adicet, plus re- search funding. Under their five-year research col- laboration, Regeneron and Adicet said they plan to enable the precise engagement and killing of tumor cells by engineering immune cells with fully human chimeric antigen receptors (CARs) and T-cell receptors (TCRs) directed to disease-specific cell-surface antigens. Regeneron and Adicet plan to identify and validate appropriate tar- gets and work together to develop a pipeline of engineered immune-cell therapeutics for the selected targets. > Juno Licenses BCMA from MSK, Eureka Therapeutics Juno Therapeutics licensed rights from Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center (MSK) and Eureka Therapeutics for a novel, fully hu- man binding domain targeting B-cell maturation antigen (BCMA), along with binding domains against two additional undisclosed multiple my- eloma targets. Juno Therapeutics plans to use BCMA and the binding domains— developed through a three-year partnership between Memorial Sloan Kettering and Eureka Therapeutics— toward developing and commer- cializing chimeric antigen receptor (CAR) cell therapies for patients with multiple myeloma. The BCMA CAR is expected to begin clinical trials in the first half of 2017. n News Discovery & Development