Etaluma and Amgen Sign Agreement Regarding “Flash” Line of Screening Systems

December 2, 2009 – (Carlsbad, CA) Etaluma Inc., increased their product line to include the FlashFluor cell-based screening platform that measures optical kinetic responses to multiple reagent additions. On October 30, 2009, Etaluma, Inc. signed an agreement with Amgen, Inc. to acquire Amgen’s patent application and know-how relating to their internally developed “Flash” line of fluorescence and bioluminescence drug screening systems. Etaluma seeks to make Flash machines more economical and powerful, and offer them for sale to commercial and academic markets.

The FlashFluor system now available commercially through Etaluma is a 96/384/1536 well pipettor and imaging plate reader, capable of concurrent liquid transfers and kinetic fluorescence and/or luminescence measurements. It can rapidly interleave fluorescence and luminescence reads resulting in multiplexed screening and assays. FlashFluor uses best-in-class commercial components and patented optics for spectrally pure and spatially uniform excitation and detection. By switching filters and camera sensitivity settings very rapidly, it can capture multiple optical signals with sub-second sampling. It is ideal for measuring intracellular calcium dynamics, ion channel and GPCR activation, protein expression, receptor recycling, and other transient cellular events coupled to optical signals. FlashFluor can detect bioluminescence from aequorin or luciferase interleaved with fluorescence from Fluo-4, GFP, or other dyes.