GOTHENBURG, Sweden, June 11 /PRNewswire/ -- Cellectricon, a leading provider of screening solutions for drug discovery, today announced a new collaborative agreement with AstraZeneca. Under the agreement Cellectricon will provide AstraZeneca with two of its new groundbreaking high throughput platform, Dynaflow(R)HT, for ion channel screening.

Cellectricon and AstraZeneca formed and announced a collaboration in May 2006 aiming to find a solution to major bottlenecks in ligand gated ion channel screening. The results from this collaboration have successfully demonstrated the unique performance of Cellectricon's cell-based microfluidic screening platform. It has clearly demonstrated the opportunity to introduce the fully automated Dynaflow(R)HT System with unmatched level of stability and throughput while still delivering unique measurement data quality. The Dynaflow(R)HT System will be launched and commercially available in 2009.

"Collaborating with AstraZeneca has been most rewarding," says Jonas Ohlsson, CEO at Cellectricon. "Driven by solving bottlenecks in drug discovery, Cellectricon's strategy is to bring state-of-the-art products for drug discovery and research to the market through world-class customer collaborations."

"This collaboration aims to accelerate our efforts in ion channel drug discovery and has been very fruitful to date. We look forward to working with the Dynaflow@HT Systems and see the impact of their throughput and cost effectiveness," says Dr. Jan-Erik Nyström, VP Local Discovery Research Area CNS & Pain Control, Södertälje, Sweden.

"The strength of this platform is that it is based on many years of cutting-edge academic and industrial research in ion channel drug discovery. I am happy to see us taking a new step together with a leading partner in advancing it further," says Dr. Jon Sinclair, VP Research & Development at Cellectricon.

About Cellectricon

Cellectricon AB, (http://www.cellectricon.com) a Swedish biotech company, successfully provides groundbreaking products to the pharmaceutical and biotechnology industries. The company utilizes state-of-the-art interfaces to biological systems by employing novel microfluidic technologies. This enables completely new types of assays and devices with superior performance characteristics and robustness. Cellectricon's products address critical bottlenecks in the drug discovery process and have been adopted by top-reference customers, including nine of the top ten pharmaceutical companies. In 2007 the company increased its annual revenue by almost 50%. In 2008-2009 the company will launch two pioneering large-scale screening platforms developed in close collaboration with leaders in the pharmaceutical industry. Used in pre-clinical pharmaceutical development, the Cellaxess(R)HT System enables high throughput RNAi screening and the Dynaflow(R)HT System greatly advances ion channel drug discovery.

Contact Details: Jonas Ohlsson, CEO, Phone : +46(0)709-73-47-92, E-mail: jonas.ohlsson@cellectricon.com; Susanne Fagerlund, VP Market Communications, Phone: +46(0)31-760-35-15, E-mail: susanne.fagerlund@cellectricon.com