Signal Transduction

Southern Research provides high-quality, customized signal transduction services to commercial clients on an outsourced basis. Our professional staff has more than 40 years of experience in many areas of tumor biology, and we offer specialized expertise in working with biotechnology and pharmaceutical clients in screening for drugs that inhibit various enzymes. For example, we have developed medium-throughput assays for screening inhibitors against various enzymes as well as affinity-labeling assays to screen for inhibitors against cysteine proteases. Additionally, our team has experience in studying signaling mechanisms of steroids and growth factors in breast and prostate cancer cells and xenografts. We also have established novel inducible systems to assess the effects of dominant negatives of signaling intermediates in various growth pathways.

Our comprehensive capabilities include:

• In vitro kinase assays for MAP kinases (ERKs, JNKs), MEKs
• Ras/Raf activation assays
• Activation of Ras-Raf-MEK-MAP kinase pathways in cells and tumors
• Activation of PI-₃ kinase pathways
• Activation of apoptosis pathways
• Cell cycle studies: cyclins, cdks and cdk inhibitors
• Tumor markers
• Tyrosine kinases and adaptors
• Adaptation of signal transduction assays for high-throughput screening
• RNA knockdown using siRNA and ribozyme technologies
• Cell cycle and apoptosis mechanisms