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How Does Carterra Support Biotechnology?

How Does Carterra Support Biotechnology?

Carterra: Advanced Biosensor Platform for Discovery & Research

Carterra, Inc. is a biotechnology and life science company offering an advanced biosensor platform that strives to expedite and streamline the discovery of novel therapeutic antibodies and vaccines for the healthcare industry.

Since its founding in 2005, Carterra continues to grow and is now a world leader in providing laboratories and research centers with high-throughput equipment for monoclonal antibodies (mAb) screening and characterization.

While it’s based in Salt Lake City, Utah, there’s also a customer experience center in Munich, Germany, which makes support easy for customers in both the US and Europe.

Carterra continues to assist in the fight against the COVID-19 pandemic. Eli Lilly and AbCellera were able to develop the neutralizing antibody Bamlanivimab (LY-CoV555) in a 90-day sprint using Carterra’s high-throughput surface plasmon resonance (SPR) technology.

Keep reading to discover just how Carterra’s equipment is aiding biotech and life science research globally!

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Carterra Products

Carterra’s product offering is designed to work together to facilitate a more efficient antibody screening and characterization process.

Carterra LSA

Carterra brings speed and efficiency to the world of antibody research and drug discovery through its LSA equipment. Carterra LSA is a biosensor platform that utilizes flow printing microfluidics and SPR detection to process and deliver 100x more data than other platforms, in 10% of the time and with 1% of the sample requirements and consumables costs.

Here’s what Carterra LSA can help you with:

The main components of the platform are its patented flow cell design and sample deck, high-throughput SPR (HT-SPR™) detection technology, comprehensive data analysis, and visualization software. The automation features, combined with high-throughput capability, let Carterra LSA analyze up to 384 samples in one unattended operation.

By using the microfluidics and patented flow printing design, the Carterra LSA lets you alternate between two assay modes that switch cartridges automatically depending on the format: 96-channel printhead and single flow cell mode. The 96-channel printhead can be nested up to 4 times, so you can build a 384 array on the SPR surface for simultaneous analysis.

Carterra LSA uses imaging-based surface plasmon resonance (SPR) detection, allowing it to monitor hundreds of locations at once without sacrificing data quality and sensitivity of the assay. High-throughput SPR lets Carterra LSA monitor molecule binding in real-time without using labels in up to 384 samples in parallel.

The data analysis and visualization software offered for the Carterra LSA includes the navigator user interface used to organize your experimental setup.

Sensor Chips & Solutions

The sensor chips provided by Carterra are necessary for running assays on your Carterra LSA. Carterra also provides a wide range of sensor chips to support the multitude of assays you can run using the LSA.

While there are ready-made chips, such as the ones you see in the picture below, you can also request custom sensor chips to better fit your research purposes.

Carterra's sensor chip list.

Carterra’s sensor chips are designed to facilitate the SPR phenomenon with a functionalized gold wafer to form an SPR coupler.

Kinetics Software

Carterra’s kinetics software also emphasizes the high-throughput kinetics analysis available when using the LSA accompanied with the kinetics analysis software by Carterra. It can perform various kinetic data analyses, such as screening and ranking, for up to 1,152 mAbs within one unattended run.

For an enhanced analysis of a mAb panel, the resulting data can also be easily linked with the epitope binning software to streamline your workflow.

Epitope Software

Carterra’s epitope binning software assists the Carterra LSA by processing the datasets generated. To match the Carterra LSA’s high-throughput capability, the epitope software is equipped with the capability to analyze up to 384 ligands tested against 384 analytes.

Review your data through various modes using Carterra’s epitope software, such as dendrograms, heat maps, sensorgrams, and various networks to get a more customized view of your data that will suit your research needs.

The combination of the Carterra LSA and its epitope binning software overcomes the problem with previous epitope binning methods. You can minimize the sample consumption and hands-on time needed to produce an epitope binning analysis and draw a conclusion from the linked data provided by the epitope binning software in less time.

Carterra Applications

The Carterra LSA, combined with its sensor chips and software, provides a myriad of applications within one platform. The range of tests it can run and its high-throughput capabilities allow the system to be used in various use cases.

High-Throughput Kinetics

Considering Carterra LSA also has its own kinetics analysis software, it’s designed to perform well for high-throughput kinetic data analysis. Carterra’s combined system performs high volume kinetics screening with minimum sample requirement, two bottlenecks researchers experience using other kinetics analysis solutions.

Epitope Binning

Epitope binning is used to characterize and categorize a library of mAbs into different bins based on the binding region of said monoclonal antibody to a target protein, an antigen.

This is an important part of drug discovery. By categorizing antibodies into bins, you are narrowing antibody candidates that will be optimal for selection as antibodies in the same bins most likely have the same function.

There are two types of protocols for epitope binning: sandwich assays and premix assays.

The epitope binning software released by Carterra is designed to be used with its LSA platform, creating a system that is optimized for high-throughput. This combination tackles the problem with traditional epitope binning solutions (high sample consumption, low throughput, and labeling restrictions).

Quantitation

Carterra LSA is also capable of high-throughput, label-free quantitation of antibodies and other proteins. Carterra’s high-throughput system allows you to analyze up to 1,152 samples in a single assay. On top of its speed, Carterra LSA also requires a low sample volume and consumables for quantitation.

Epitope Mapping

Similar to epitope binning, epitope mapping plays an important role in the selection of antibodies. While epitope binning categorizes antibodies based on their binding region, epitope mapping is responsible for identifying the binding regions of an antibody on its target antigen.

Using the LSA and epitope binding software, Carterra creates a high-throughput system capable of screening mAb libraries against a 384 peptide array to identify binding sites.

The software then generates visual representations necessary for you to analyze your data, including heat maps, sensorgrams, and dendrograms.

Therapeutic Areas

In therapeutic areas, Carterra’s system assists the therapeutic discovery of many diseases, including infectious diseases and vaccines, immuno-oncology and cancer treatments, and autoimmune diseases.

Take the recent COVID-19 pandemic as an example. The virus spreads and mutates relatively quickly, so vaccine development needs to catch up to the SARS-CoV-2 virus’s rapid infection and evolution. It needs to be measured within weeks instead of the year’s researchers are used to.

To help researchers with rapid development, a high-throughput system like Carterra LSA is needed.

In infectious diseases, Carterra’s LSA is particularly useful to assist the development of therapeutic cocktails by analyzing the epitope characterization of antibodies and refocusing the development process.

Antibody Discovery Formats

Antibody discovery is a required step for drug development. Recognizing the binding kinetics, affinity, and epitope coverage toward a specific target will help you determine the potential therapeutic candidate and build a comprehensive antibody library to gain deeper insight into your antibody panel.

Carterra LSA’s high-throughput platform lets you identify key parameters, binding kinetics, affinity, and other characteristics faster, which speeds up the therapeutic development process. Some examples of applications Carterra LSA can help with are bispecific antibody discovery, antibody-drug conjugates (ADC), and CAR-T therapy.

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Put R&D First with Excedr

Carterra is a biotech company offering an advanced and high-throughput biosensor platform, the Carterra LSA, to speed up the discovery of antibodies and vaccines used in therapeutic research.

Carterra LSA pushes the efficiency of your antibody discovery process by reducing the amount of time and sample size needed to produce data-rich insights. While it’s a great setup to have, there are a lot of things to purchase.

The cost of purchasing the complete setup of the Carterra LSA, its sensor chips, kinetics software, and epitope binning software means you need to put in a significant amount of money to be able to use this cutting-edge technology.

Consider leasing your equipment instead of buying it. Instead of an enormous upfront cost that drains your budget and eats up funding, you can take advantage of low monthly payments and outfit your lab with the instruments you need to accelerate research while preserving mission-critical operating capital.

Get in touch to see how we can help you save money for your next lab upgrade.