Building GPCR Assays That Reflect Real Biology

The biggest signal is not the same as the truest one. Jane Lamerdin and Gaurav Agrawal of Eurofins DiscoverX on what actually makes a GPCR assay trustworthy.

Overexpress a receptor and you get a big, convenient readout that drifts away from what happens in a living cell. Across nearly three decades of building cell-based assays, Lamerdin and Agrawal have learned that physiological relevance, not raw expression, is the real benchmark, and increasingly it is what regulators expect too.

This conversation moves from the company's roots in cyclic AMP and arrestin biology to the receptors that refuse to yield an assay, the long road from a discovery screen to potency and lot release, and why the obesity drug wave brought the largest target class back to the front of drug discovery.

What you will take away:

• Why physiological relevance beats maximal expression, and how that raises the technical bar
• What it takes to move one assay from discovery all the way to potency and lot release
• Why some GPCRs, from adhesion receptors to orphans stuck in the ER, refuse to cooperate
• How decades of documented failures keep a portfolio from reinventing dead ends
• Why obesity and GLP-1 biology put GPCRs back at the center of drug discovery

Dr. GPCR Ecosystem: https://www.ecosystem.drgpcr.com/Eurofins DiscoverX: https://www.ecosystem.drgpcr.com/eurofins-discoverxMembership and Pricing: https://www.ecosystem.drgpcr.com/university-pricing