Seahorse Announces the XF Glycolysis Stress Test Kit

BILLERICA, Mass., April 25, 2012 /PRNewswire/ -- Seahorse Bioscience, the leader in cellular bioenergetic measurements, announced the launch of its newest stress test kit at the American Association of Cancer Research (AACR) Annual Meeting 2012. The XF Glycolysis Stress Test Kit is the first Standard for measuring glycolytic capacity in cells.

Cells rely on two major pathways, mitochondrial respiration and glycolysis, to meet their energy demand. Mitochondrial respiration metabolizes fats yielding greater energy in the form of ATP than glycolysis, which burns sugar to make ATP. Yet cancer cells, which have high energy demands to fuel their growth and metastasis, utilize the less efficient glycolytic pathway more often than do most normal cells. The reason for cancer's unique metabolism, initially observed by Nobel Prize winner Otto Warburg in 1932, and now called the Warburg effect, remains unclear and a topic of debate.

The XF Glycolysis Stress Test Kit makes it easy to measure cell glycolysis in real-time, in a microplate format. This comprehensive, easy-to-use kit measures the three key parameters of glycolysis: Glycolytic Flux, Glycolytic Capacity, and Glycolytic Reserve; revealing critical information not evident in endpoint or snapshot measurements.

"Our lab has used the Glycolysis Stress Test to determine the glycolytic profile of prostate cancer cells (PC3M), compared to normal prostate cells (PCS)," stated Arig Ibrahim Hashim, MD, and Jonathan Wojtkowiak, PhD, who work in the Department of Cancer Imaging and Metabolism under the chairmanship of Robert J. Gillies, Ph.D., at the H. Lee Moffitt Cancer Center in Tampa Florida. "This information would have been difficult to obtain without this powerful functional assay. The test showed that PC3M cells were highly glycolytic, which is a metabolic phenotype that we hypothesized would benefit from buffer therapy. We tested this hypothesis using free-base lysine, a nonvolatile buffer capable of neutralizing tumor pH. This approach increased survival and reduced metastases in this prostate cancer model, suggesting a potential new therapeutic strategy for the treatment of malignant prostate cancer," noted Dr. Hashim and Dr. Wojtkowiak. "Since that time, we have performed the Glycolysis Stress Test on numerous cancer cell lines, and the data have been very illuminating", said Dr. Gillies. This work was recently published in the Journal of Cancer Science & Therapy.

For use with the XF Extracellular Flux Analyzer, the new XF Glycolysis Stress Test Kit will enable the study of cellular bioenergetics and help scientists to better understand the connection of physiological traits of cells with genomic and proteomic data. This knowledge will generate new insights into understanding glycolysis and mitochondrial dysfunction, leading to a greater understanding, and new treatments of diseases as the human lifespan increases.

About AACR

Founded in 1907, the American Association for Cancer Research (AACR) is the world's first and largest professional organization dedicated to advancing cancer research and its mission to prevent and cure cancer. The AACR marshals the full spectrum of expertise of the cancer community to accelerate progress in the prevention, biology, diagnosis and treatment of cancer by annually convening more than 20 conferences and educational workshops, the largest of which is the AACR Annual Meeting with more than 18,000 attendees. For more information, visit www.AACR.org.

About Seahorse Bioscience

Seahorse Bioscience provides instrumentation and kits for cellular bioenergetic analysis for biological research and drug discovery applications. Over 1,500 scientists worldwide are advancing their research in understanding the role of cellular bioenergetics in Neurodegeneration, Aging, Cancer, Cardiovascular, Cell Physiology, Toxicology and Hepatobiology, Immunology, Infectious Diseases, Mitochondrial Diseases, Model Organisms, Obesity, Diabetes, Metabolic Disorders, Screening, and Translational Medicine. Seahorse Bioscience is headquartered in Billerica, Massachusetts, U.S., and has regional offices in Copenhagen, Denmark; and Shanghai, China. For more information visit, www.seahorsebio.com

CONTACT: Cynthia Egan, +1-978-671-1600, [email protected]

SOURCE Seahorse Bioscience, Inc.