FOx Biosystems, a biosensor company, and VIB, the life sciences research institute in Flanders (Belgium), announced today that VIB will become an important research institute to evaluate the White FOx 1.0 in its workflows as part of its vision for adopting breakthrough technologies.

The proprietary FOx technology in the White FOx 1.0 system turns the well-established surface plasmon resonance (SPR) principle into a highly performant, easy-to-use, and cost-effective analytical instrument for biomolecular interaction analyses. Its performance and versatility makes it an interesting system for VIB to speed up its research in the field of cancer and neurology.

VIB’s Technology Watch Initiative implements new, emerging, and disruptive technologies into its laboratories and research facilities. Active since 2008, the Technology Watch program evaluates strategic technology investment opportunities and provides the funding to secure prototype instruments and high-potential, early-stage technologies.

The White FOx 1.0 will be placed in the lab of Prof. Anna Sablina, in the VIB-KU Leuven Center for Cancer Biology. Professor Sablina’s research is focused on understanding the cooperative interactions that conspire to promote tumorigenic transformation. To discover drivers of cancer development and progression, they create experimental models of cell transformation derived from primary human cells that mimic alterations found in human cancer samples. These models provide a useful platform to delineate pathways involved in cell transformation and to discover new targets for therapeutic intervention. “The FOx technology will also be evaluated in the VIB-KU Leuven Center for Brain & Disease Research amongst others by the lab of Professor Frederic Rousseau and Professor Joost Schymkowitz, and the group of Professor Lucia Chávez Gutiérrez. We expect that the FOx system can have substantial benefits in other research fields across the life sciences also, such as cancer research, structural biology, and beyond in therapeutic development,” adds Halina Novak, PhD, technology and innovation manager at VIB.

FOx’s sensor technology can be used, depending on the required sensitivity, in a label-free or labeled mode enabling the quantification of specific proteins, small molecules, DNA, and cells in microliter volume samples. “Additional advantages of the FOx technology compared to competing technologies, are its throughput, speed of measuring, and the ability to directly analyze crude cell lysates. As such, the White FOx 1.0 makes it possible for our scientists to detect different target molecules up to 10 times faster, at a low cost base and with a high flexibility,” adds Silvie Van den Hoecke, PhD, Life Science Technology Specialist at Tech Watch.

“The versatility and robustness of the FOx systems are key benefits in current high-level research,” says Filip Delport, CTO of FOx Biosystems. “The evaluation of our technology by VIB, notably one of Europe’s most innovative research institutes, will show the benefits in different cutting-edge research fields.”