Company expands beyond core business of discovery and safety services to

  meet the evolving needs of the drug discovery and development community



    BOSTON and CLEVELAND, Aug. 6 /EMWNews/ -- ChanTest, the

world-leading provider of validated ion channel-expressing cell lines and

services for drug-discovery and development applications, will make a

selection of its fully validated cell lines available to researchers

through a new Web site: http://www.chantestchannels.com. ChanTest Founder

and CEO Arthur ("Buzz") Brown announced the new business offering today at

the Drug Discovery & Development Innovative Technologies conference in

Boston. ChanTest's initial launch will be of nine cell lines that the

company has validated on the major ion channel platforms, including manual

patch clamp, PatchXpress(R), QPatch, IonWorks(R), Quattro(TM), and

FLIPR-Tetra(R). Optimization on all platforms is in progress. According to

Dr. Brown, the company will expand the number of cell lines available

during 2008 to 64.



    "As the preeminent ion channel company, our goal is to serve all the

ion channel needs of pharmaceutical and biotech customers -- from early

functional screens for profiling drug candidates or ranking within profiles

during the drug-discovery process -- to a complete set of in vitro GLP

service products for cardiac risk assessment," said Dr. Brown. "However,

some companies prefer to maintain testing in house. For those customers,

we're pleased to offer a new way that researchers can benefit from

ChanTest's ion channel expertise and exhaustive study of the

characteristics of our ion channel library -- by purchasing our validated

cell lines. We want to ensure that all researchers have the best

opportunity to identify ion channels as pharmaceutically relevant targets

and accelerate work on providing new drugs to those targets."








    The nine initial validated cell lines available currently include the

following:



    Channel:    hERG   hERG      KvLQT1-MinK    Kir2.1    Kv1.5

    Cell Type:         HEK293    CHO    CHO     HEK293    HEK293



    Channel:           Kv4.3      HCN4          Nav1.7    Kv1.3

    Cell Type:         HEK293     HEK293        CHO       HEK293



    ChanTest scientists were the first to prove hERG as the target for

adverse cardiac events linked to non-cardiac drugs: Seldane (terfenadine),

Propulsid (cisapride), and Nizoral (ketoconazole), and ChanTest pioneered

the development of functional, cell-based ion channel testing as a means to

predict cardiac side effects produced by non-cardiac drugs. Such testing is

now a standard component of regulatory submissions prior to the approval of

drugs for use in humans. ChanTest is committed to innovation, and is

leading the next major advance in ion channel research and services with a

$10 million program to develop the world's most extensive library or

catalog of ion channels. ChanTest's expert electrophysiologists fully

validate the ion channels for interrogation with functional,

pharmacological, and biochemical assays.

    About ChanTest



    The preeminent ion channel services company, ChanTest serves its drug

discovery and development customers with GLP safety and automated screening

assays using its library of ion channel-expressing cell lines -- the most

comprehensive in the world. Since its inception in 1998, ChanTest has

tested some 20,000 compounds for approximately 400 global pharmaceutical

and biotech companies -- helping them to achieve their drug safety and

discovery goals. ChanTest works in partnership with customers to speed the

drug-development process, save time and money, and ultimately -- to help

make better, safer drugs. The company also offers a selection of its

validated cell lines directly to customers for use in their internal

research. Because of ChanTest's seminal role in this field, along with the

company's uncompromising commitment to quality, ChanTest was named "most

trusted fee-for-service provider" for ion channel screening in the HTStec

Ion Channel Trends Survey for two years in a row. ChanTest is based in

Cleveland, Ohio. For more information, please visit

http://www.chantest.com.