Inflammation and Immunology

Inflammation is a crucial part of the body’s immune response to injury or insult, but it is often painful, and may cause further damage. In extreme cases, it can be fatal. Inflammatory responses that occur inappropriately or are poorly controlled are a major cause of disease, morbidity and poor quality of life.

A range of debilitating diseases result from chronic inflammatory responses. Many are autoimmune diseases, such as asthma, allergy, rheumatoid arthritis and inflammatory bowel disease. Others are metabolic diseases, including fibrosis and NASH. Numerous key cells and functions behind inflammatory disease overlap with targets for immuno-oncology.

Inflammation and Immunology

Sygnature Discovery has developed a broad understanding of the inflammatory and immune mechanisms and pathways that underpin many disease pathologies. Our expert scientists are highly skilled in the art of developing meaningful and efficient assay cascades to support clients’ research projects. This, coupled with Sygnature’s experienced medicinal chemists and DMPK, offers a truly integrated drug discovery platform that has delivered numerous clinical assets in diseases such as Asthma, COPD and IBD.

Our bioscience department have significant experience in developing in vitro cell assays to measure a range of inflammation and immunological biomarkers, processes and endpoints. The in-house blood donor panel gives ready access to whole blood, PBMC and isolated key immune and inflammatory cells from healthy donors. We can also access both fresh and cryopreserved whole blood and blood-derived cells from patients through our contacts with local hospitals, universities and specialist suppliers.

We use a wide range of assays to study key inflammatory and immune cell functions, and also develop bespoke assays.

Our experienced bioscience team help clients’ projects progress through proof of concept in vivo studies and into the clinic by providing tailored biomarker solutions and human disease-relevant translational assays.

Inflammation Assay platforms

We offer a wide range of inflammation assays, including:

• Modulation of intracellular signalling events, such as calcium, cAMP and phosphoprotein levels in inflammatory cell systems.
• Proliferation (IncuCyte), chemotaxis, multiplex cytokine release (Luminex), NETosis (cell imaging), pyroptosis, metabolism (Agilent’s Seahorse), gene expression arrays (qPCR).
• Differentiation of human naïve cells to produce more disease-relevant cell phenotypes, including M1 and M2 macrophages and neuro-inflammatory microglia cells.
• Flow cytometry and cell imaging can be used to identify and assess the functions of discrete subpopulations of immune cells, including T cell subtypes such as Th17 and NK cells.
• Bespoke assays can be developed to study the unique inflammatory and immune pharmacology of individual targets, for example eosinophil receptor signalling.