SynSignal is a multidisciplinary high-tech consortium working in synthetic biology's area of greatest untapped potential, delivering a synthetic biology toolbox and finished products custom designed for major present and future industrial applications of cellular signaling.

Cellular signaling systems are crucially important for a broad range of critical health and disease areas and high value industrial applications. Signaling systems are the target for more than half of the medicines marketed by the pharmaceutical industry, and form the main R&D area for the nutrition, flavour and fragrance industries.

BioXtal is involved in this project to discover and characterize functional antibody fragments to stimulate or inhibit synthetic signaling cascades, by providing our expertise in

• Target over-expression and purification
• Binders development, selection and functional characterization.

We are happy and proud to work with our partners to enhance our discovery and technology platform, thereby increasing our efficiency, output and valuation:

• The European Molecular Biology Laboratory (Dr Imre Berger)
• University College Dublin, National University of Ireland (Prof Boris Kholodenko)
• Karolinska Institute (Prof Per-Olof Berggren)
• Deutsches Institut fuer Ernährungsforschung Potsdam-Rehbruecke (Prof Wolfgang Meyerhof)
• Fundació Privada Centre de Regulació Genòmica (Dr Luis Serrano)
• Geneva Biotech Sárl (Dr Daniel Fitzgerald)

The 2014 BIO International Convention is June 23-26 in San Diego, California. The BIO International Convention is the largest venue for private company-to-company meetings in the world.

Etienne L'hermite, BioXtal's CEO, will be at BIO and would be very pleased to present our activity and projects to any interested parties. http://convention.bio.org/2014/

Following the signature of an agreement with LifeTechnologies, Bio-xtal has initiated the transposition of all its catalogue reference using the TetOn - TetOff technology. After intensive evaluation of various Eukaryotic systems for the expression of membrane receptors, Bio-Xtal have been convinced by the superiority of the LifeTechnologies solution. Accordingly, the company is currently transferring our entire catalogue in this system, and should be able to launch about 100 new products shortly. We plan to complete the transfer of all our catalogue references by the end of 2014. Thanks to this agreement, we are able to provide CHO and HEK stable cell lines, enriched membrane preparations and purified receptors in yield compatible with structural biology studies. This technology offers many advantages, such as stability of the expression yield over the time, straight-forward up-scaling, over 10e6 receptor/cell level of expression for a majority of our references and flexibility to adapt our product offer to the end-user preferred construct.

Artificial binder technology

The artificial binder technology has been developed by the CEA on the principal of a scaffold-free binder. Starting from a protein-protein complex structure, the technology identifies scaffolds from the PDB that present the same topological profil as the binding motif of a complexed partner. Once the appropriate scaffold is selected from the PDB, the binding motif of the initial protein is 'transferred' by mutating the new scaffold and tested for binding. Artificial binders have been successfully discovered using this technology for ion channel ligand mimetics and metalloprotease inhibitor mimetics.

Structure-based secondary structure-independent approach to design protein ligands: Application to the design of Kv1.2 potassium channel blockers.
Cuniasse P. et al.
J Am Chem Soc. 2006 Dec 20;128(50):16190-205.