Ciphergen and Beckman Coulter Announce Alliance to Automate Clinical Proteomics
FREMONT, Calif., and FULLERTON, Calif., March 5 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ -- Ciphergen Biosystems, Inc. (Nasdaq: CIPH - news) and Beckman Coulter, Inc. (NYSE: BEC - news) announced today an alliance to automate clinical proteomics research by combining Ciphergen's unique biomarker discovery and assay platform with a custom configured version of Beckman Coulter's Biomek® 2000 system. Optimized for use with the ProteinChip® Biomarker System, the new turnkey solution will be offered exclusively through Ciphergen to biopharmaceutical companies as well as universities and government research institutes.
The advantage of Ciphergen's proprietary SELDI ProteinChip technology is the speed at which minute quantities of a wide variety of biological samples can be screened to detect differentially expressed proteins (Expression Difference Mapping(TM)). Coupling the liquid handling capabilities of Beckman Coulter's Biomek with Ciphergen's 96- and 192-well ProteinChip Array processors, sample throughput can be increased by five-fold or more while improving reproducibility. In addition, the Biomek can be used to perform sample fractionation procedures prior to chip binding, thus increasing the number of proteins detected from each sample.
``Our Biomarker Centers(TM) have been running large biomarker discovery projects for several pharmaceutical partners as well as for our own account,'' commented William E. Rich, President and CEO of Ciphergen. ``To meet our throughput requirements, we have developed an integrated robotics approach. Beckman Coulter became our obvious choice as a partner because of their established leadership position in laboratory automation. We are happy that we can now make these solutions available broadly through this alliance with Beckman Coulter.''
``Ciphergen's growing installed base of ProteinChip Systems is a natural candidate for the standardization and automation afforded by Beckman Coulter's leading liquid handling and robotics instruments,'' said George Bers, President of Life Science Research for Beckman Coulter. ``Collaborating with Ciphergen adds a key strategic element to our proteomics program, enabling us to enhance our offerings to important segments of the marketplace.''... |
