Gentronix Ltd was founded by Richard Walmsley in 1999 to commercialize the first of several new genotoxicity assays developed in his laboratories at the University of Manchester. Genotoxins are chemicals that can damage the genome and most are carcinogens.
Since 1999 Gentronix has grown from a grant-supported research enterprise to a successful revenue and investment-supported member of the North West biotechnology community in the UK. The company has developed a range of "GreenScreen" genotoxicity test platforms, and sells reagent test kits to customers in the pharmaceutical and biotech sectors in Europe, the USA and Japan.
The particular expertise in Gentronix is in the development of novel screening assays for genotoxicity. At present this critical safety assessment is often left until the late pre-clinical GLP regulatory tests, and is often restricted to a lead candidate and one or two backups. This is of course a very risky strategy: the compounds already carry a heavy investment of time and money, and there is a relatively high rate of failure or delay due to positive genotoxicity data - anything from 10-25% of compounds will carry positive data of genuine concern. Genotoxicity screening is a relatively recent phenomenon - it was neither planned, nor possible when the original regulatory assays were established. These assays require hundreds of milligrams of test compound and take between 1 and 8 weeks to generate data. In contrast the GreenScreen assays consume less than 10 milligrams of compound and generate results in 48 hours.
The regulatory focus of the emerging field of genetic toxicology effectively stifled innovation for many years, but Gentronix has been in the vanguard of development for new in vitro mammalian cell tests suited to high throughput screening. A series of papers from the Walmsley group, starting in 2005, described these new methods and their performance. This coincided with a series of papers from industry experts revealing what many had already, privately come to accept: that the current regulatory in vitro mammalian assays are simply not very accurate. More than half of non-carcinogens give misleading positive results. The much higher accuracy of the GreenScreen assays, with only around 5% of non-carcinogens giving positive results, has stimulated interest in the GreenScreen products both in many pharmaceutical testing labs and within international regulatory agencies.