Bringing Cell Biology In-House: A Strategic Expansion of 2bind’s Service Portfolio

April 2025, Regensburg, Germany – 2bind GmbH, a leading contract research organization (CRO) serving the global drug discovery and development sector, today announced the official commissioning of its newly established Biosafety Level 2 (BSL2) certified cell culture laboratory, complementing its already existing BSL1 facility. This expansion marks a significant milestone in 2bind’s ongoing evolution from a biophysics-focused service provider to a full-spectrum biopharma services CRO, enabling the company to offer an integrated workflow from in-house cell preparation through to advanced biophysical and cell-based characterization.

Key Facts

• BSL2 Certification: 2bind’s new cell culture facility meets all regulatory and safety requirements for handling standard immortalized cell lines, human-derived primary cells, and cell lines requiring BSL2 containment protocols.
• Integrated Cell-Based Workflows: The laboratory directly supports 2bind’s Single-Cell Interaction Cytometry (scIC) and flow cytometry service lines, ensuring end-to-end quality control from cell preparation to data delivery.
• Expanded CRO Capabilities: The facility strengthens 2bind’s position as a CRO, supporting clients in screening phase, lead selection, lead candidate risk assessment and mitigation of their antibody development process as well as hit identification, hit validation, hit-to-lead and lead optimization of their small molecule drug discovery process with cell-contextualized data.
• Controlled and Authority-conform Infrastructure: In-house cell culture enables full traceability of cell quality, passage history, and preparation conditions, directly enhancing the reproducibility of client-facing assay data.

Supporting 2bind’s Cell-Based Assays with new BSL2 facility

The establishment of the BSL2 facility gives 2bind complete in-house control over the cell preparation workflows that underpin its cell-based assay portfolio. Previously reliant on externally sourced cell material, 2bind can now culture, expand, and quality-control a broad range of cell types within its own facility, including standard immortalized cell lines, human-derived primary cells, and cell lines classified under BSL2 containment requirements.

This internal capability eliminates a critical variable in cell-based measurements: sample consistency. By maintaining full oversight of passage number, viability, and culture conditions, 2bind ensures that the biological material entering its assay workflows meets defined quality criteria, a prerequisite for generating reproducible and comparable data across projects and clients.

The new facility directly supports 2bind’s broad service portfolio, including cell viability and cytotoxicity assays, cellular signaling and cellular response assays, NanoBRET in vivo binding assays and the NanoBRET target engagement platform, as well as NK/T-cell recruiting assays. 2bind’s cell-based service lines also cover receptor quantification, ligand inhibition, affinity ranking, and binding screens via flow cytometry, and binding kinetics, binding screens, and ligand inhibition assays via single cell interaction cytometry (scIC). These capabilities position 2bind to support clients across a wide range of cell-based experimental needs, from early target engagement studies through to functional characterization and lead optimization.

For clients working with primary immune cells, patient-derived material, or cell and gene therapy applications, areas where cellular heterogeneity and sample integrity are particularly critical, the ability to prepare and handle BSL2 classified material on-site represents a direct expansion of accessible experimental scope.

The new laboratory is a concrete expression of 2bind’s broader strategic repositioning under its “Pharma Services” identity. As the company continues to align its capabilities with the real-world workflows of drug discovery and early development, the BSL2 facility ensures that cell-based assay services are supported by the same level of scientific rigor and infrastructure that clients expect from a modern CRO. Combined with 2bind’s established biophysical platforms, this addition enables a seamless offering: from molecule to mechanistic insight, within a single controlled environment.