KCAS will be attending, exhibiting, and presenting in Barcelona next week at the EBF open symposium with Flowmetric and Active Biomarkers

The European Bioanalysis Forum Open Symposium is a premier European forum for experts to meet and discuss bioanalysis and biomarker topics, similar to the WRIB event held in the United States.  EBF is an organization for European companies to discuss the regulations and guidance that affect bioanalytical specialists. It also offers several initiatives for European organizations that US-based companies are not a part of throughout the year. The symposium taking place in Barcelona in mid-November, allows anyone to attend.

As with other similar conferences and forums, Covid impacted EBF in the last few years. The event went virtual in 2020 before offering limited attendance the following year. Jeff Goddard, Sr. Vice President at KCAS, and I attended in 2021, to understand how the conference had taken shape in a post-Covid environment. Pleased with what we saw, we decided EBF would be a good conference for KCAS moving forward, especially as we look to connect more with European customers.

This year, KCAS is proud to announce that we will be attending, exhibiting and presenting during the European Bioanalysis Forum in Barcelona.

With KCAS able to offer services in both large and small-molecule bioanalysis as well as supporting cell & gene therapy assay services, there were many opportunities available to choose topics for our presentation. We speak a lot about small molecules and discuss proteins and antibodies but there’s a mid-space where our KCAS discovery team has done considerable work with oligonucleotides and large peptides that I felt would be a perfect topic to present. Our group has built a lot of experience around these particular molecules, and it was a nice fit to showcase that experience.

The presentation will address the challenges that our team faces – particularly substituted peptides. Speaking molecularly, peptides are generally more predictable, but in terms of trying to adapt peptides to be more medically applicable, several companies are looking at adding other chemical moieties such as lipid chains that can drastically affect how the peptide behaves in the body. This can make the development of bioanalytical assays significantly more challenging. They are not designing the drug with bioanalysis in mind; they’re designing the drug intending to improve the pharma PK properties of a compound. However, the side effects of adding a lipid to a peptide, for example, create some new issues that will need to be dealt with.

In addition to the typical challenges associated with peptide methods, these additions make the method development process less predictable.  As an example, we see mid-size molecules with absorption in walls of tubes in the LCMS system, causing issues with possible carryover, so you must come up with some ways to solve the issues with these molecules – and that’s what the team at KCAS does.