The Truth About GPCR Product Launches: Years in the Making
- Dr. GPCR Podcast
- Oct 8
- 4 min read
Most scientists only see the final kit—the catalog number, the plate-ready reagents. But the reality? Every GPCR assay that makes it to market carries years of failures, late-night ideas, risky bets, and off-script breakthroughs.
In this behind-the-scenes look at the making of Revity’s pHSense, Dr. Eric Trinquet shares what it really takes to bring a product to life—from sketch to shelf. If you’re in GPCR discovery or biotech R&D, this is a masterclass in turning deep science into scalable tools.
From Platform to Pivot: The Birth of HTRF
The journey to pHSense didn’t begin with a probe. It began with a diagnostic company rethinking its core technology. Dr. Eric Trinquet joined Cisbio in the early 2000s, working on what would become HTRF—Homogeneous Time-Resolved Fluorescence. Initially applied to biomarkers in blood, its no-wash, miniaturized design caught the attention of high-throughput screeners.
But there was a pivot: the tech had untapped potential for GPCRs.
Functional assays for GPCRs—especially Gq-coupled receptors—were notoriously messy.
Calcium flux? Not stable.
IP3 detection? Radioactive and cumbersome.
Trinquet’s team asked a bolder question: could they design equilibrium-based assays for pathways no one had touched before?
They didn’t just ask. They delivered.
Why This Matters:
The GPCR toolkit scientists use today—cAMP, IP-One, and now pHSense—didn’t evolve incrementally. It was born from radical rethinking of assay design, where platform constraints became product opportunities.
Built to Fail, Built to Win: The IP One Gamble
After the success of their cAMP assay, Trinquet’s team took a risky bet: develop a functional readout for Gq signaling without relying on calcium. That meant targeting inositol monophosphate (IP1), a stable downstream marker of IP3.
But the path wasn’t clear.
Months were spent debating assay design. IP1 isn’t naturally abundant or easy to detect. The gold standard was still radioactive tracers and purification columns.
Eventually, the team landed on a design that could accumulate and detect IP1 in a 384-well format. They benchmarked it against the radioactive gold standards—and it held up.
“The IP-One project was one of the riskiest things we did. But the moment we got bench-level data that aligned with our design—it became a breakthrough.” — Dr. Eric Trinquet
The Real Work Starts Before the Lab
What most scientists don’t see is how long a product exists as theory before it exists as a neatly packaged kit. pHSense was no different. It started not with biology—but with chemistry.
Revvity and academic collaborator Prof. David Parker spent years designing rare-earth europium probes. The goal wasn’t to build a pH sensor—it was to create brighter, more stable lanthanide complexes for HTRF.
But a pattern emerged: some scaffolds showed dual responsiveness to pH through lifetime and brightness modulation. That opened the door to a 2D sensor—one that responded cleanly to endosomal acidification with unmatched sensitivity.
Classic pH probes failed in plate readers—too noisy, too dim. pHSense rewrote that rule, enabling high-throughput GPCR internalization assays without imaging.
Internalization as a Functional Readout
The insight? GPCR internalization isn’t just a trafficking readout—it’s pharmacology.
Trinquet’s team designed pHSense to detect that, without microscopy. By covalently attaching the probe to FLAG-tagged receptors or using labeled antibodies, they created a plug-and-play assay format.
More importantly, it worked across formats: from overexpression systems to endogenous GPCRs in native beta cells.
Their “aha” moment came when they ran a dose-response with Exendin-4 on GLP-1 receptors—and saw clean, plate-based internalization curves without needing a single image.
Mini Timeline: The Road to pHSense
→ Initial lanthanide probe design with Durham University (chemistry)
→ Discovery of pH-sensitive dual response (brightness + lifetime)
→ Application to GPCR models with Jean-Philippe Pin’s lab
→ Breakthrough internalization data in endogenous cells expressing GLP-1R
→Commercial launch of pHSense as a plate-ready assay
Real Partnerships, Not Just Sponsorships
Behind every breakthrough assay is a web of collaborations that rarely make the brochure. Revnity’s partnership with Durham (chemistry) and the Institute of Functional Genomics in Montpellier (GPCR pharmacology) was not transactional. It was a scientific co-creation.
Academic labs tested, challenged, and refined the tools. The result was not just a reagent—but a validated method to explore GPCR function across systems and species.
And this ethos continues: every product is just the beginning of a feedback loop, where customer data feeds the next generation of design.
For Early-Career Scientists:
If you want to work in product R&D, learn this: real innovation happens in the tension between rigor and serendipity. You’ll fail 90% of the time. The fun is what you do with the other 10%.
🎯 From Launch to Legacy
For Dr. Trinquet, commercialization isn’t the end of a project—it’s a milestone in a longer journey. It’s when you invite the community in. It’s when the tools you built in-house meet the problems no one saw coming.
pHSense isn’t just a probe. It’s a strategic tool for decoding GPCR behavior in drug discovery and systems biology. It reflects decades of foundational R&D—from the fluorescent probes of Cisbio’s early days to the receptor-targeting strategies of today.
And for those on the front lines of GPCR science, it’s a new lens to see what’s always been there—just below the surface.
Want to hear Dr. Trinquet tell the story in his own words?
⸻
More about Revvity
⸻
Want more like this?
👉 Join the Dr. GPCR Premium Ecosystem for behind-the-scenes access to GPCR innovators, exclusive deep-dives, and practical tools to accelerate your research or career.
👥 Build connections. 🧪 Get insights. 🎧 Stay ahead.
Comments