Raindance Technologies and 454 Life Sciences are developing a targeted next-generation sequencing (NGS) system for investigation of drug absorption, distribution, metabolism and excretion (ADME).
As part of the collaboration, Raindance and 454 Life Sciences plan to commercially launch a core ADME gene-screening research panel that will address one of the large unmet research needs in academic, pharmaceutical and biotechnology markets.
The panel will be made available on both the 454 Life Sciences' GS Junior and GS FLX Systems.
The announcement was made in conjunction with the Society of Toxicology's 50th Annual Meeting in Washington, DC, and financial terms were not disclosed.
Adverse drug events represent more than two million hospitalisations annually in the US.
According to the companies, more effective early warning indicators of drug metabolism and molecular pharmacology hold the potential to reduce more than 50 per cent of hospitalisations associated with adverse drug events, to simplify optimisation of drug dosing and to enable the prediction of responders and non-responders.
Current ADME research products are primarily limited to genotyping common alleles and therefore lack the sensitivity, breadth of genomic coverage and ability to identify previously unknown variants.
The Raindance and 454 Life Sciences collaboration will enable researchers to interrogate a set of core pharmacokinetic and pharmacology genes, and also to detect known and unknown functional mutations associated with drug metabolism and response.
Raindance's proprietary primer design method enables accurate, consistent and reproducible next-generation sequencing in ADME research, which is required for large-scale drug metabolism studies.
454 Life Sciences' GS Junior and GS FLX Systems provide long sequencing reads that enable higher levels of coverage, accuracy and quantitation with fewer dropouts, as well as detection of a wide range of genomic variations, including SNPs, insertions, deletions, and multinucleotide polymorphisms.
