RainDance Technologies, Inc., and 454 Life Sciences, a Roche Company, announced a collaboration for the development and commercialization of a targeted next-generation sequencing (NGS) solution for the 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.

Adverse drug events represent more than two million hospitalizations and approximately $1 billion in healthcare cost burden annually in the United States. More effective early warning indicators of drug metabolism and molecular pharmacology hold the potential to reduce more than 50 percent of hospitalizations associated with adverse drug events, as well as enable the optimization of drug dosing and the identification of responders and non-responders.

Current ADME research products are primarily limited to genotyping common alleles, and lack the sensitivity, breadth of genomic coverage and ability to identify previously unknown variants that are important to drive scientific discovery and routine use, the companies said in a statement. The RainDance and 454 Life Sciences collaboration will enable researchers to interrogate a set of core pharmacokinetic and pharmacology genes, while at the same time detect known and unknown functional mutations associated with drug metabolism and response.

RainDance’s proprietary primer design methods enable highly 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 high-quality, long sequencing reads which 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, the companies say.

Date: March 7, 2011
Source: RainDance Technologies
454 Life Sciences