SQNM item (really sounds more like an "update" than "news")...
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Tuesday October 10, 7:01 am Eastern Time
SEQUENOM Completes Design of More Than 400,000 SNP Assays; MassEXTEND(TM) Assay Portfolio Covers Majority of SNPs in the Public Domain
SAN DIEGO, Oct. 10 /PRNewswire/ -- SEQUENOM(TM), Inc. (Nasdaq: SQNM - news) today announced that it now has more than 400,000 single nucleotide polymorphism (SNP) assays (tests for genetic markers) available for use in genomics research. This portfolio includes assays for The SNP Consortium's publicly available SNP markers. The assays will be used to validate the SNP candidates, analyze their characteristics in individuals and populations, and determine their medical utility. The portfolio of 419,796 SNP assays was completed using SEQUENOM's automated assay design process and proprietary MassARRAY(TM) technology. As a result, these assays are now available to MassARRAY customers. The assays will also be used in SEQUENOM's collaboration, also announced today, with the Sanger Centre and The SNP Consortium.
``Equipped with a working draft of the human genome, efforts such as The SNP Consortium are discovering an impressive number of SNP markers,'' said Toni Schuh, Ph.D., SEQUENOM's President and CEO. ``Now, these SNPs must be validated and further analyzed to determine their medical utility and obtain their ultimate value. The first critical step toward accomplishing this is making the transformation from a large marker portfolio to a large assay portfolio. SEQUENOM has designed these assays covering the majority of SNPs in the public domain as products to accelerate the SNP analysis efforts of The SNP Consortium members, as well as other academic and commercial entities, to discover the association of genetic variations to disease.
``We have found that our ability to design SNP assays quickly, inexpensively, and yet accurately gives us a significant competitive advantage,'' Dr. Schuh continued. ``This allows us to offer our existing and future customers and collaborators a faster, competitively priced, large-scale SNP analysis solution. Combined with our ability to determine SNP allele frequencies from pooled DNA samples, the data quality of our MassARRAY system and our DNA population bank as a reference tool to determine the medical utility of SNPs, we are clearly in a leadership position to determine, both internally and in collaboration with our MassARRAY customers, the association of SNPs to major human disorders, which we can use to improve diagnostics, drug development and therapeutics.''
Assay design is consistently the bottleneck in large-scale genotyping. To address this issue, SEQUENOM has developed an automated assay design process using sophisticated software. According to Richard Macdonald, Ph.D., SEQUENOM's Vice President of Bioinformatics, the Company's proprietary SpectroDESIGNER(TM) program has been perfected through large-scale SNP validation studies, including more than 10,000 experimental measurements from the previously announced collaboration with the National Cancer Institute (NCI).
``Using our novel approach to assay design, we have taken the information from the public domain and efficiently completed the traditionally time consuming and costly step necessary to conduct SNP analysis,'' added Charles R. Cantor, SEQUENOM's Chief Scientific Officer. ``Our in-house SNP validation studies and collaborations with customers, such as the NCI, support the accuracy of the assays to be immediately useable in high throughput and sample pooling applications. As a result, SEQUENOM and its customers will be able to use any or all of these assays without any further modification whatsoever in a host of genomics applications, including diagnostic testing.''
At the core of each assay is a set of three different oligonucleotides. Therefore, SEQUENOM is a large consumer of oligonucleotides and, through its assay sales, will become one of the largest providers of oligonucleotides. As such, a top priority for the Company has been to secure an adequate supply of high quality oligonucleotides for SEQUENOM and its customers. This has been accomplished through recent agreements with two leading oligonucleotide manufacturers, Integrated DNA Technologies in the U.S. and Metabion in Europe.
SEQUENOM is a post-genomics company translating information generated from the map of the human genome into practical applications by offering a comprehensive genotyping technology to determine the medical relevance of genetic variations. SEQUENOM's distinct competitive advantage is a bottleneck-free SNP analysis solution consisting of its highly accurate and robust MassARRAY(TM) system, an automated assay development process and assay database, the ability to analyze hundreds of samples in a single reaction and a proven health-based concept for genetic marker validation. As a leader in SNP analysis, SEQUENOM offers its powerful technology to customers in diagnostics, pharmacogenomics, drug development and agricultural biotechnology, while using the MassARRAY technology with a novel scientific strategy for in-house programs to identify the medical utility of SNPs. SEQUENOM is headquartered in San Diego, California with offices in Hamburg, Germany and Boston, Massachusetts. |
