First Catalog Cancer Biochip for Sequence Capture Now Available ...( LEXINGTON Mass. and HEIDE...)

LEXINGTON, Mass. and HEIDELBERG, Germany, July 13 /PRNewswire/ -- febit holding gmbh announced today the launch of the first human cancer biochip for HybSelect, febit's highly automated technology for sequence capture, enabling targeted Next-Generation Sequencing (NGS). The new catalog cancer biochip features 115 important genes which are reported to be associated with common types of cancer by the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute.

"Molecular signatures defined by large-scale gene expression profiling are at the forefront in developing new biomarkers and identifying new therapeutic targets," said Professor Eckart Meese, director of the Department of Human Molecular Genetics at Saarland University. "It is of utmost importance for our research on malignant brain cancer to obtain deep sequencing results of the 100 most relevant genes with high sequence coverage using the HybSelect technique. It is equally important to obtain these results within a short period of time and at low costs."

The availability of the automated HybSelect technology supports large-cohort NGS studies that aim to elucidate complex diseases such as cancer, drive forward personalized medicine and investigate new therapeutic delivery models. febit will stay at the forefront of cancer research and include key research study results in the next generation of febit's cancer biochips. A 2Mb exon cancer biochip will be available this summer and a 30Mb biochip is planned already for release in 2010.

Multiplex NGS studies based on sequence capture can be supplemented by other molecular fingerprinting methods, including mRNA and miRNA expression profiling. Both of these high-throughput methods can be performed using the same febit technology as HybSelect, thereby reducing capital expenditures and minimizing experimental variation. HybSelect and expressio
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