Your Biochemical Assays
for Drug Discovery
Robust assays are critical to early drug discovery, where screening data quality determines efficient hit-to-lead progression. Axxam designs and executes HTS-ready primary assays and fit-for-purpose secondary assays that support hit identification, hit qualification, and de-risking, enabling confident progression from screening to lead optimization.
Our capabilities span both cell-free (biochemical) and cell-based assays, allowing complementary evaluation of compound activity. While cell-based assays provide functional insight, cell-free biochemical assays offer a key advantage in early discovery by delivering direct, target-proximal readouts with reduced biological complexity. This allows for more precise assessment of target engagement, mechanism of action, and structure–activity relationships, while minimizing confounding factors.
Custom assay development services can be delivered as standalone services or within Axxam’s DiscoveryMAXX integrated drug discovery platform, ensuring continuity from high throughput screening (HTS) to hit qualification and lead optimization for pharma and biotech discovery programs.
Types of biochemical assays we develop
We develop and run enzymatic assays, interaction assays, and biophysical assays, strategically applied at each discovery phase. Assay development from scratch and optimization of assays transferred by clients focus on maximizing signal window, robustness, and reproducibility, with workflows designed for efficient transfer to high-throughput screening. Readouts cover HTS-compatible state-of-the-art screening technologies.
- HTS-ready, fully validated enzymatic platforms supporting hit discovery and lead optimization across diverse target classes.
- Robust kinetic characterization and automation-compatible workflows ensuring data quality, scalability, and rapid progression from target to lead.
- Advanced, sensitive platforms to address protein–protein, protein–DNA, and protein–RNA interactions, including challenging and emerging target classes.
- Proven expertise in screening for inhibitors, stabilizers, degraders, and molecular glue strategies.
- Orthogonal, high-precision methods to confirm binding, assess target engagement, and elucidate mechanisms of action.
- Integrated data packages to strengthen hit validation and accelerate confident decision-making.
Assays are supported by scalable in-house recombinant protein production in bacterial, insect, or mammalian systems, enabling reliable supply for large screening campaigns and flexible generation of full-length, truncated, and mutant protein variants.
Biochemical assays across drug discovery
Axxam designs primary and secondary biochemical assays that align with each discovery phase, ensuring robust high-throughput screening, reliable hit confirmation, and generation of decision-quality data that enable confident progression from HTS to hit-to-lead optimization.
Primary biochemical assays are designed to enable robust hit identification through high-throughput screening of large compound collections. Axxam develops HTS-ready primary assays optimized for 384- and 1536-well formats. These assays provide reliable, target-proximal readouts that support efficient identification of high-quality hits and seamless progression into downstream validation and hit-to-lead activities.
Secondary biochemical assays include hit validation assays to confirm true target engagement, interference and artifact detection assays to eliminate false positives, off-target and selectivity panels to support early de-risking, and mechanism of action studies to characterize how confirmed hits modulate the target.
Hit validation assay
• Orthogonal assays
• Concentration-response
• Reproducibility
Off-target and selectivity panels
• Closely related enzymes/proteins
• Family panels
• Safety de-risking
Mechanism of action studies
• Competitive vs. non competitive
• Allosteric Modulation
• Kinetics and pathway positioning
Biophysical and binding assays
• TSA/DSF on proteins and RNA with different dyes
• TRIC/Spectral Shift
• nanoDSF (Tycho NT.6)
• Fluorescence Polarization
Interference and artifact detection assays
• Fluorescence quenchers
• PAINS-like behaviours
Protein production
Biochemical assays can be developed using in-house purified proteins, client-provided targets, or commercially available proteins. Axxam offers recombinant protein production across multiple expression systems, including bacterial, insect (baculovirus), and high-density suspension mammalian cells, to support a wide range of target types. Priority is given to the expression of full-length proteins with regulatory domains, preserving orthosteric and allosteric sites and enabling physiologically relevant screening, including high-molecular-weight and multimeric targets suitable for HTS.
Why develop your biochemical assay with Axxam?
Developing a biochemical assay goes far beyond running a simple test: it requires precision, deep characterization, and tailoring to the goals of a drug discovery program. At Axxam, we go beyond kits by directly measuring kinetic parameters such as catalytic rates (Km), enzymatic reaction linear ranges, and aKd values for interaction assays, configuring each assay in a sensitive concentration range for enzymes or protein-protein interactions.
We optimize all assay components based on the type of compounds to be identified: whether inhibitors, activators, competitive, allosteric, or multifunctional modulators, and perform extensive buffer screening to ensure the most robust and reproducible readout. By combining these capabilities with scientific expertise and advanced technologies, Axxam delivers scalable, high-quality biochemical assays that accelerate hit identification, strengthen hit-to-lead decisions, and support efficient lead optimization.
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