On this interview, we speak to Subodh Nimkar, Marketing Director at Gator Bio, about their latest technology, Gator Pro which allows for fast, reliable, and high-quality data. 

Please are you able to introduce yourself and tell us about your role at Gator Bio?

I’m Subodh Nimkar, Marketing Director at Gator Bio. I actually have been at the corporate for 2 years, having worked within the industry for over 25 years. Previously, I actually have worked with corporations comparable to Applied Biosystems, Thermo Fisher, and Agilent.

Gator Bio is an organization arrange to maneuver medicine forward by opening recent doors to researchers. Are you able to tell us more about Gator Bio and a few of your core goals and values?

Gator Bio is motivated by the numerous challenges discovery scientists face while developing proteins, small molecules and viruses based biotherapeuics. This includes development of antibodies for immunotherapy and delivery of specific genomic material for cell and gene therapy. The corporate’s bio-layer interferometry technology brings significant advantages over other platforms available in the market.

Our technology is built around our biosensors, the guts of our technology, each for antibody characterization and gene therapy, specifically viral vectors and non-viral vectors analytics.

The biotechnology field has evolved rapidly in recent times, with recent technological advancements being made at an unprecedented pace. How do you’re feeling the biotech sector has evolved during the last ten years, and what do you enjoy most about working in such a fast-paced environment?

We’re a comparatively recent company with multiple platforms available in the market, launching our first product 4 years ago. We’ve observed that almost all of the innovation in biotherapeutics is occurring in small and medium-sized biotech corporations.

At Gator Bio, our platforms are positioned so as to add significant value to those small- and medium-sized biotech and now biopharma corporations. Throughout the last three years, we now have launched many biosensors and instrumentation to assist drive growth or increase efficiency for these smaller corporations to develop biotherapeutic products.

As within the later stages of development, the therapeutic pipeline moves to more outstanding biopharma corporations, we now have also upped our game by offering higher throughput and better accuracy platforms that may be more attractive to those traditional big biopharma corporations.

Image Credit: Sergey Nivens/Shutterstock.com

Gator Bio is accountable for the creation of Bio-layer Interferometry Technology (BLI), first designed in 2001. Could you tell us more about this technology and the way it really works?

Dr. Hong Tan first developed the BLI instrumentation during his time at ForteBio. The Gator Bio founders, Hong Tan and Bob Zuk, observed that, significant gaps still exist within the BLI portfolio, and addressing those would help develop each antibody or protein-based and AAV gene therapy-based biotherapeutics more efficiently and cheaply.

This led them to form Gator Bio and launch these newer next-generation bio-layer interferometry products. They really add value in productivity, efficiency, and cost-effectiveness.

BLI technology can support multiple stages of therapeutic development. How is that this, and why was it essential to you to design a technology adaptable for researchers?

Since significant chunk of the early discoveries occur in smaller and medium biotech corporations after which move to larger biopharma corporations, we would have liked to develop products that can meet the necessities of smaller biotechs but will also be scaled up.

All our technology is developed with this in mind. For instance, an entry-level product, which is Gator Prime, supports a 96-well-based format, a superb starting instrument for small startups. Then there’s Gator Plus, which supports each 96-well and 384-well plates, a much higher throughput platform.

Finally, we recently launched Gator Pro because we now have reached some extent where our robustness is exceptionally high, and we are able to raise the throughput without sacrificing accuracy. This implies, studies comparable to very high-throughput quantitation, epitope binning, and kinetics, can now be carried out in an especially high-throughput manner without sacrificing accuracy.

You have got recently launched your latest product, Gator Pro, which is an instrument designed for fast, automated, high-throughput evaluation. Are you able to tell us more about your latest product and the way it really works?

Gator Pro is a platform able to carrying out quantitation of 1,152 samples in a single run, removing the necessity for added automation to do these large sample batches. It utilizes 32 high-frequency spectrometers to sample 32 signals in parallel, meaning there is no such thing as a sacrifice within the accuracy of those measurements.

This platform is a natural evolution of our Gator Prime and Gator Plus systems. Those that have developed their methods and assays on lower throughput Gator Plus can quickly ramp up throughput using Gator Pro and perform all three studies: epitope binning, kinetics, and quantitation accurately.

Gator Pro can automate the info acquisition and processing of as much as 1,152 samples per batch, allowing for fast, reliable, and high-quality data. What advantages do that speed and accuracy have for researchers working on multiple projects concurrently? Are there another advantages the Gator Pro provides researchers?

The Gator Pro system may be deployed in some ways; in a conventional way, to perform quantitation, kintetics and epitope binning by itself, or, it could possibly even be used as a really efficient and accurate screening tool before SPR validation. An awesome complementary tool to SPR. Typcally, the kD values for binding kinetics, and epitope binning experimentation results, from SPR are considered the gold standard. Nonetheless, the SPR system can lack throughput or be signficant burden on the budget or each.

With the Gator Pro system, large variety of antibodies or antibody-antigen interactions may be screened, filtering out the not-so-interesting candidates, and the remaining candidates can then be validated using the SPR platform. This workflow can significantly improve productivity and price efficiency of candidate selection and validation.

The Gator Pro will also be coupled along with your biosensors, consumables, and navigator software. What advantages does an ‘all-in-one’ total solution provide your customers?

Our core philosophy is offering total solutions, not only the tools as a ‘Swiss knife’. After all, our platforms may be used as a ‘Swiss knife’ and folks can develop their very own biosensors or ask us to develop custom biosensors. But, we try to supply total solutions for the antibody discovery applications we support.

The identical applies to AAV analytics needed in gene therapy. We provide total solutions that can help customers do their assays, from research to clinical trials, using the identical platform. Our very high-sensitivity titer and empty versus full assays for AAVs are being done very efficiently and effectively in the businesses developing gene therapy. Gator Bio assays are the one assays currently available on the market which can be truly crude sample compatible, and may be deployed at every stage, from harversting to final product formulation. We’ve also developed a platform method for very efficient TABs assay, a straightforward and price effective alternative to cell based assays.

Image Credit: Gator Bio

We’re seeing many corporations shift to automation of their technology to assist speed up what often may be lengthy and tedious processes. What role do you’re feeling automation plays inside life sciences research, especially surrounding drug discovery, and what role do you see it playing in the long run?

Automation is a key component of any development, each within the very early and the later stages of development. For bio-layer interferometry, screening multiple antibodies using epitope binning or kinetics is considered one of the important thing applications.

This involves studying a lot of antibody-antigen interactions, which must be carried out in a short time and accurately to enable corporations to screen out unnecessary or ineffective molecules during early discovery. That is where automation plays a key role for our customers and us, and we are going to proceed offering our software APIs and integration with multiple partners going forward.

You’re showcasing your recent technology at SLAS, a world exhibition bringing together each industry professionals and world-leading researchers within the life sciences. How essential are in-person exhibitions like SLAS in promoting recent technology and developing recent partnerships?

As a comparatively recent but fast-growing company, we have to be present in shows like SLAS to extend visibility and construct partnerships to supply automation integration. Moreover, biotech and biopharma corporations are in search of total solutions, and that’s where our presence is critical for our growth and visibility.

With continued innovation in science, are you hopeful that we are going to proceed your mission to ‘make meaning out of each molecule’?

We play a small but essential part in overall biotherapeutic discovery using our bio-layer interferometry solutions, but, we imagine that the biotherapeutic industry is growing in the standard drugs based on small molecules, protein and antibodies, and in addition within the gene and cell therapy markets.

We strongly imagine that the industry will grow, and we are able to add value to our customers in small, medium, and enormous biopharma industries.

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What’s next for Gator Bio? Do you could have any exciting projects/developments within the pipeline?

We’ve many exciting projects within the pipeline. Our core market is our antibody and protein-based therapeutics customers. We give attention to developing truly novel biosensors that can enable our customers to develop methods and conduct their studies much more efficiently and effectively.

We even have gene therapy developers who’re using Gator titer and empty/full assays for AAVs. For gene therapy, as I discussed earlier, we’re specializing in total solutions from very early discovery to clinical trials.

About Subodh Nimkar

Subodh Nimkar for last 2 years has focused on delivering novel Biolayer Interferometry based solutions for antibody characterization and viral vector analytics. He brings over 25 years of selling and product management experience within the life sciences instrumentation, software and consumables business.

The extensive experience spans the fields of protein characterization and quantitation using mass spectrometry and Edman sequencing, and a number of other years in next-gen sequencing. Along with managing marketing and product management within the USA, Subodh has also experience within the Asia Pacific and EU.