June 5, 2008



For Immediate Release

June 5, 2008 Cambridge Isotope Laboratories, Inc. (CIL)

Cambridge Isotope Laboratories, Inc. (CIL) Announces Collaborative Venture with Membrane Receptor Technologies, LLC (MRT)

Boston, Massachusetts: Cambridge Isotope Laboratories, Inc. (CIL), the world leader in the manufacturing of stable isotope labeled research chemicals announced the formation of Membrane Receptor Technologies LLC (MRT), a collaborative venture between CIL and Dr. Stanley Opella, a world-renowned NMR spectroscopist and professor of Chemistry and Biochemistry at the University of California, San Diego. MRT will provide atomic resolution information about the structure and drug interactions of

G protein-coupled receptors (GPCRs) to biotech and major pharmaceutical companies for use in drug discovery.

G protein-coupled receptors (GPCRs) constitute a superfamily of proteins that transduce signals across the cell membrane. They are the largest, most versatile, group of membrane receptors and also the most pharmaceutically important, accounting for over 50% of all human drug targets and acting as therapeutic targets for a wide range of disease conditions including cancer, cardiovascular, metabolic, CNS and inflammatory diseases. Current efforts to develop new drugs that target GPCRs are slowed by the lack of detailed information regarding the three-dimensional structure, internal dynamics and ligand binding sites of these proteins. Newly developed NMR-based methods hold the promise to determine the three-dimensional structure and binding interactions of GPCRs with drug candidates. Dr. Opella is enthusiastic about the prospects for this new venture, because, “Obtaining this type of information on GPCRs in their native environment of phospholipid bilayer under physiological conditions will greatly accelerate the discovery of drugs that target GPCR-related disorders that affect a large number of patients”.

CIL’s collaboration with MRT and recent acquisition of M-fold Biotech GmbH allows us to offer new technology for drug design which incorporates C13 and N15 labeled amino acids and cell growth media for the expression of labeled GPCR proteins, followed by a protein refolding by M-fold and high-field NMR analysis by MRT.

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