Wafergen Biosystems has announced positive data on the company's Smartchip real-time PCR system at a conference held by Cambridge Healthcare on 25-27 February in San Francisco.
The Smartchip system's ability to generate real-time polymerase chain reaction (PCR) results in clinical samples for approximately 1,000 oncology genes in triplicate on a single chip, using small amounts of RNA (300-500ngs) in less than three hours.
Wafergen believes this demonstrates the Smartchip system's ability to produce a fast time to results.
Other findings included a significant reduction in required reaction volume from 25-50uL to 100nl, saving on reagent cost, and the establishment of the Smartchip system's equivalence in performance to current real-time PCR standards.
Finally, successful demonstration of key Smartchip system workflow elements, including primer-ready Smartchips and the drying and reconstitution of primers for rapid high-throughput 100 nL real-time PCR.
It is important to note that all of these results were achieved using clinical biological samples from emphysema, idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis (IPF) and healthy patients.
Wafergen's Smartchip alpha testing programme, which is being conducted at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine, involves the study of RNA isolated from lung tissue samples from healthy patients, as well as patients with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) and IPF.
Researchers are screening these RNA samples with the Smartchip real-time PCR system in order to assess the platform's performance in conducting novel gene expression research.
The next phase of the alpha testing program will focus on using the Smartchip system to identify biomarkers of interest.
