OREANDA-NEWS. May 17, 2012. Yokogawa Electric Corporation announces that it has entered into an agreement with Wako Pure Chemical Industries, Ltd. ("Wako") on the marketing and after-sales service of Yokogawa's CellVoyager™ CV7000 high-throughput cytological discovery system in North America and Europe.

Wako manufactures reagents, diagnostic agents, and equipment for life science applications and has an extensive sales and service network among pharmaceutical companies and drug discovery research institutions in Europe, the US, and Canada, which are the global centers of drug discovery research*1. Through this agreement, Yokogawa will expand its drug discovery support system business.

CellVoyager CV7000 is an automatic testing system that is capable of administering hundreds of thousands or even millions of compounds to cells, capturing images of the resulting changes in the cells, analyzing the obtained images, and screening them to find promising drug candidates. This system is comprised of a confocal scanner unit, which can observe live cells in real time, and a high-accuracy positioning mechanism. The CellVoyager CV7000 features the industry's fastest screening times and highest image resolution, and is highly regarded worldwide.

Under the terms of this agreement, Yokogawa will collaborate with Wako by combining that company's high-throughput screening system with the CellVoyager CV7000, thereby providing a total drug discovery automation solution. All processes, from preparation to screening and evaluation of candidate compounds, will be automated by the combined system. The elimination of the need for system configuration will make it much easier for customers to introduce the system.

*1 The top 10 pharmaceutical companies worldwide are all based in the US and Europe.