March 12, 2007
Caliper Life Sciences
Kevin Hrusovsky
President and CEO
How has your company adapted and responded to the changing economic climate in the past five years when so many others companies did not?
The changing economic climate has presented tremendous opportunity for companies willing to invest in innovative technologies. Throughout the past five years, Caliper has invested over 20 percent of sales revenue into R&D for new projects, enabling us to launch five new products in Q4 2006. We also acquired best-in-class pre-clinical imaging technology (Xenogen) and service (NovaScreen), companies that position Caliper to better serve the needs of our customers — namely the pharmaceutical industry, which continues to face increasing pressure to deliver safer, effective drugs in a timely manner while minimizing costs.
What is your vision for the future of the life sciences market over the next several years?
The future for life sciences is very bright. We see a significant opportunity to achieve rapid growth for our company. Our strategy to take advantage of the opportunities in life sciences is to focus on bridging the gap that exists between in vitro and in vivo drug discovery by offering technologies and services such as microfluidics, biophotonic imaging, automation, and drug discovery outsourcing solutions that improve predictability and clinical relevancy. We are working to connect what happens in the test tube to what happens in the human body as early as possible. This focus is imperative to our customers, many of which are developing leading edge approaches to curing cancer, diabetes, heart disease, and other life-threatening diseases.
What products and services does your company provide and what special capabilities do they offer the life sciences market?
The attrition rate of drugs in the late pre-clinical stage of drug development is approximately 99 percent — primarily due to the lack of research tools available to bridge in vitro and in vivo experimentation to human gap (I-I-H). Caliper is playing a major role in addressing these issues by offering best-in-class research tools and services designed to help researchers expose the potential success or failures of a compound earlier in the discovery and development process. Our microfluidic LabChip platform is the gold standard for kinase inhibitor screening. Additionally, Caliper’s IVIS In Vivo Imaging Systems, used to monitor biological processes in living animals, coupled with our Discovery Alliances & Services Division, is helping customers correlate in vitro with in vivo data and ultimately help predict the clinical relevance of cancer drugs prior to market.
Partnerships are an effective way to track life science advances and ensure that your company delivers timely products and services. Which life sciences companies or organizations have you partnered with or invested in and why?
The success of our Caliper Driven program is fueling the adoption of microfluidics and helping move this technology into genetic diagnostic and immunodiagnostic applications in the clinical setting. Through our partnerships with Wako Pure Chemical Industries and Canon U.S. Life Sciences, microfluidic-based diagnostic applications are moving forward. We also have long-standing partnerships with Agilent, Affymetrix, and Bio-Rad.
What are your most exciting products and initiatives in development, and how will they improve life science research?
Caliper has several exciting products and initiatives currently in development. Two recently launched products are poised to make a substantial impact on how pharmaceutical companies conduct research: the Desktop Profiler and IVIS Spectrum In Vivo Optical Imaging System.
Kinase profiling enables the identification of potential side effects in drug candidates thus helping researchers better understand how a compound will react in the human body. Caliper’s Desktop Profiler provides researchers with a bench-top profiling system used in conjuction with assay ready microplates containing a diverse set of kinases.. Experiment set-up time is reduced, giving laboratories a viable, economical alternative to outsourced profiling. The Desktop Profiler utilizes Caliper's LabChip microfluidic-based screening technology to yield high-quality, reproducible data that helps researchers more confidently qualify drug candidates, increasing the pace of kinase research in oncology, cardiovascular, and metabolic research labs.
The IVIS Spectrum In Vivo Optical Imaging System is another product in Caliper's extensive offerings designed to accelerate drug development while minimizing cost and speeding time to market. The IVIS Spectrum helps scientists better visualize, track and understand how a therapeutic compound reacts, at a molecular level, in vivo. This ultimately results in providing scientists with more clinically relevant information on a compound before reaching the clinical stage. The IVIS system helped Pfizer gain approval of Sutent, a promising new drug used to treat certain types of cancer.
Where do you see your company in five years?
Caliper is moving forward at a rapid pace. We are committed to helping the pharmaceutical industry attack research bottlenecks, and we are confident our efforts will help revolutionize the drug discovery and development process. Through our range of innovative products and services, we are providing the necessary tools to bridge the I-I-H gap, and addressing key issues in the areas of oncology, cardiovascular, and metabolic disease. Five years from now we will be the recognized leader and an essential partner in bridging I-I-H drug discovery and, reflecting that position, our company scale will be nearly twice what it is today.