LifeSpan Adds 1,200+ New Antibodies To Its Proprietary IHC-plus(TM) Product Line

SEATTLE, Jan. 29, 2013 /PRNewswire/ -- LifeSpan BioSciences, Inc. (LSBio), the world's leading provider of high quality, immunohistochemistry (IHC) validated research antibodies, announced today that it has added more than 1,200 proprietary IHC-plus™ antibodies to its catalog.  The additions include a collection of nearly 900 antibodies targeting G Protein-Coupled Receptors (GPCRs), an important family of proteins that are the targets for nearly one-third of all pharmaceutical drugs currently on the market.  In 2012, the Nobel Prize for Chemistry was awarded to Robert Lefkowitz and Brian Kobilka for their pioneering studies of GPCRs and research interest in these potential drug targets has been high.  Also added were antibodies to a variety of protein kinases, ion channel and nuclear receptors that are also of particular interest to researchers around the world.  All of these antibodies were developed by LSBio for major pharmaceutical and biotech customers and are now available online and through an international network of highly respected distributors.

With this increase, LSBio may now control the most extensive collection of IHC validated antibodies to the GPCR family and is well on its way to achieving its goal of building the world's largest catalog of value added reagent antibodies for use in IHC.  LSBio's catalog currently contains more than one hundred thousand antibodies that may be used in various types of assays and roughly 10% of these are in the IHC-plus product line. 

Immunohistochemistry (IHC) has proven to be especially valuable in preclinical studies of new drugs. Researchers in pharmaceutical and biotech companies, and in academia, are increasingly relying on IHC to establish the presence or absence of drug targets in diseased and normal tissues, helping to predict the activity of prospective drugs and the risks of potential side effects.  To visualize an antibody-antigen interaction using IHC, the tissue specimens are fixed in formalin, embedded in wax, and sliced into thin sections which are placed on microscope slides.  An amount of antibody is then introduced, incubated, and stained with a dye.  The slides can then be examined under a microscope to detect specific molecular markers.

IHC-plus™ antibodies are high quality research reagents that LSBio has extensively tested at four different concentration levels against more than twenty formalin-fixed paraffin-embedded (FFPE) human tissue samples, plus additional controls.  The results of these tests are then validated by LSBio pathologists and documented with high resolution images of the stained tissues, which are of great value to researchers in evaluating antibody specificity and their suitability in potential studies.

About LifeSpan BioSciences, Inc.
LSBio is the industry leader in providing immunohistochemistry (IHC) services and IHC-validated reagent antibodies to pharmaceutical, biotechnology, and academic researchers in more than 50 countries across Europe, Asia and North America.  For more information, please visit www.LSBio.com.

Contact:
Joseph P. Brown
President and CEO, LifeSpan BioSciences. Inc.
206-464-1554
[email protected]

SOURCE LifeSpan BioSciences, Inc.