Cell Signaling Technology
Switching an Entire Company to Macs
In the world of biotechnology, many companies spend years developing a single product.
Cell Signaling Technology manufactures 1,000 products — reagents that scientists use in experiments to identify mechanisms underlying cell function and disease. CST’s core reagents — antibodies to phosphoproteins — are widely used in cancer research and critical to all stages of pharmaceutical drug discovery and development.
As the first step in creating a new reagent, explains CST’s Informatics Director David Merberg, someone in the company learns about a newly-discovered phosphoprotein or a new phosphorylation site in a known protein.
“If we think it’s a significant discovery, we’ll develop an antibody for that phosphorylation site,” Merberg says.
Immunohistochemical analysis of paraffin-embedded human lymph node, using ICAM-1 Antibody in the presence of: antigen specific peptide (left), control peptide (right)
Launching New Products in the Lab
Scientists in the informatics group use LaserGene on iMacs or iBooks to predict the best peptide antigen for the new antibody; they then run BLAST with the peptide.
If they are satisfied that the peptide is unique to the target, they’ll email the sequence to the company’s peptide synthesis group. After synthesis, the peptide will be used as an antigen to produce the antibody.
Further along in the production process, scientists purify the antibodies and subject them to tests ranging from gel electrophoresis to immunopreciptation, immunohistochemistry and flow cytometry.
Data Management on a Mac
Throughout the process, Macs track and feed data to CST’s Xserve, which contains more than 120 FileMaker Pro databases, including databases for products, peptide assignments, immunohistochemistry, flow cytometry, antibody development and product tracking.
“Many scientists can write Perl scripts in the simple software development environment that comes on the Mac. Certainly, I can write programs very quickly that help people enormously in comparison to standard shrink-wrapped software.”
Some of the data includes images. “Image management has been a strength of the Mac for a long time,” Merberg says. “Data also has to find its way into our catalog and onto our website so customers can see how the antibody works.”
Non-IT people developed most of the database. “We’ve been able to establish a working company with 1000 products and databases, which, for the most part, have been built by non-IT people,” says Merberg.
“The fact that we got this far building our entire data management system in FileMaker Pro is really amazing.”
Fast Perl Scripting
Gathering data is only one part of the equation. “As a science-based company, we see quite a lot of activity at the bench level in gathering data,” Merberg says. “This data loses much of its value if you can’t find or interpret it.”
Perl is a key tool for helping CST scientists find the data they need. “It’s made a big difference in high-throughput biology, and many scientists can write Perl scripts in the simple software development environment that comes on the Mac,” says Merberg.
“Certainly, I can write programs very quickly that help people enormously in comparison to standard shrink-wrapped software.”
CST scientists also use web-based data-interpretation tools and standard productivity software such as Microsoft Excel, all on their Macs.
