Jan. 21 /PRNewswire/ -- GeneFormatics Incorporated, a leader in protein structure and function determination, announced today that it has entered into a strategic collaboration with Takara Shuzo Co. Ltd. of Japan to commercialize its proprietary protein structure/function determination technology in Asia.
Takara Shuzo's BioMedical Group has long been a worldwide leader in the field of genetic engineering as a supplier of reagents and developer of innovative products and technologies. With this expertise as a foundation, Takara has recently expanded into the field of genomic analysis. Through its partnership with Affymetrix, Takara has become the first company in Japan to commence commercial manufacturing and marketing of DNA chips and chip-analysis equipment. Takara now seeks to incorporate GeneFormatics' protein structure and function determination technology to further enhance its growing capability in the field of genomic analysis.
Under the terms of the agreement, Takara has exclusive rights to market in Asia (including Japan, China, South Korea and Taiwan) GeneFormatics' proprietary products and services for determining protein structure and function. These products and services are based on GeneFormatics' in silico protein structure and function determination technologies, as well as its nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy (NMR) technologies recently acquired through its merger with Structure Function Genomics LLC and its exclusive commercial license from Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey. Takara has also made an investment in GeneFormatics as part of the collaboration.
``Takara's diversified business expertise ranging from the marketing of biomedical products in Asia to sophisticated genomic analysis serve to establish GeneFormatics as a leader in protein function determination globally,'' stated John Chiplin, Ph.D., President and CEO of GeneFormatics. ``We are looking forward to working with Takara to provide novel pharmaceutical targets to the drug discovery community in Asia.''
``GeneFormatics is the first proteomics company to provide an integrated platform to address the challenge of determining protein structure and function,'' stated Ikunoshin Kato, President of Takara Shuzo's BioMedical Group. ``We believe that this collaboration significantly enhances Takara's already diverse biomedical and genomic analysis portfolio.''
Proteins regulate most biological processes and thus are the target of the majority of pharmaceutical products on the market today. However, a vast number of proteins identified from the Human Genome Project and other genome sequencing efforts are known only at the amino acid sequence level, providing little information about a protein's physical structure or biological function. Without knowledge of a protein's function, there is normally little information about its role within an organism or its potential as a pharmaceutical drug target. Accordingly, the real value of the deluge of genomic data cannot be realized until methods, such as those being used by GeneFormatics, are available to quickly and accurately determine the physical structures and functions of the encoded proteins.
GeneFormatics' in silico technology has allowed it to rapidly determine protein function on a genomic scale from models of the proteins that comprise an organism's complete proteome. The Company determines protein function by building a three-dimensional structure from a protein's primary amino acid sequence using proprietary software and then applies its proprietary Fuzzy Functional Form(TM) (FFF(TM)) technology to rapidly identify specific function-correlated sites of interest in the structure in these models. This novel and powerful method results in function determinations that are much more accurate that those using amino acid sequence alignment methods or secondary structure prediction information.
Through its recent merger with Structure Function Genomics and exclusive commercial license from Rutgers, GeneFormatics has now incorporated high-throughput NMR spectroscopy technology into its operations so that it can now rapidly experimentally confirm the novel targets it develops with its in silico technology. GeneFormatics is the first company to offer such an integrated, rational approach in the structural genomics field.
Takara Biomedical Group, a division of Takara Shuzo (Kyoto, Japan), has extensive experience in Asia and worldwide as a premier provider of biomedical research products. Its market share in reagents for molecular biology in Japan is over 50%, with wide range of products such as PCR and related enzymes and kits, restriction endonucleases, and modifying enzymes. Takara, together with its subsidiary Dragon Genomics Co., is also rapidly expanding its business into genomics, microarrays and gene therapy.
GeneFormatics, a proteomics company located in San Diego, CA, is a leader in the determination of protein structure and function. The Company's proprietary technology solves the problem of mining and categorizing the huge volumes of genomic data by using a protein's structural information to determine function, even when only the protein sequence is known. Recent customers include Schering-Plough, Bristol-Myers Squibb and Astra Zeneca. |
