Febit has launched a human cancer biochip for Hybselect, the company's highly automated technology for sequence capture, enabling targeted next-generation sequencing (NGS).
The catalogue cancer biochip features 115 important genes that are reported to be associated with common types of cancer by the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute.
Prof Eckart Meese, director of the Department of Human Molecular Genetics at Saarland University, said: 'Molecular signatures defined by large-scale gene expression profiling are at the forefront in developing new biomarkers and identifying new therapeutic targets.
'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 personalised medicine and investigate new therapeutic delivery models.
A 2Mb exon cancer biochip will be available this summer and a 30Mb biochip is planned 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 minimising experimental variation.
Hybselect and expression profiling can be performed in the researcher's laboratory operating a Geniom RT Analyzera from Febit or by using the company's convenient analytical services.
