Strategic Diagnostics announces the successful expansion of its proprietary genomic antibody technology into the Japanese life science industry through a partnership with Oriental Yeast
Strategic Diagnostics reports that its partnership with Oriental Yeast is meeting commercialisation targets for its genomic antibodies service offering within the Japanese life science industry.
In September of 2006 Oriental Yeast and Strategic Diagnostics expanded their relationship by designating OYC as SDI's exclusive distributor of genomic antibodies in Japan.
In a Japanese trade release, OYC projected a run-rate of $1 million in incremental sales during the first year of commercialisation.
OYC has a strong direct sales force with long standing relationships in the leading Japanese biotechnology, diagnostic, and pharmaceutical companies.
OYC was already representing SDI's large-scale production antibody business for various mission critical reagents.
"We are pleased with the initial effort of OYC's life sciences team and the growing momentum in building demand for custom polyclonal and monoclonal antibodies using our genomic antibodies technology platform," commented Matt Knight, president and CEO of Strategic Diagnostics.
"With about 12 weeks now under our belt, we feel confident that OYC will continue to see adoption of the Genomic Antibodies platform, consistent with their sales projections".
Genomic Antibodies technology generates novel antibody reagents faster, more cost effectively, and without the need for purified protein or peptide.
Customers only need to supply genetic sequence of their protein of interest electronically to begin generating a custom antibody project.
By using a proprietary vector system, native protein is expressed by the host animal, in a manner that elicits an immune response to the encoded protein.
This method allows the production of an antibody generated against the protein's native structure, as opposed to standard methods that use a synthesised surrogate.
The advantages of this system allow the development of reagents against traditionally intractable targets such as highly conserved and transmembrane proteins.
The system is highly scaleable, allowing the generation of custom libraries consisting of hundreds of antibodies.
Oriental Yeast is a leader in supplying recombinant proteins and custom recombinant services to the life science industry.
Its own innovative technology, Hicep, is a proprietary, custom service for gene analysis, which unlike traditional microarrays, does not require the customer to have prior information about the target genes.
Hicep is able to identify both small variations in expression levels within living cells, and new transcripts within a cell.
These new transcripts can then be studied further for their role in disease by using the newly discovered sequence as antigen information within the genomic antibodies platform to create novel antibody tools.
Toshikuni Naito, president and CEO of OYC commented: "Our technologies are complementary and allow OYC to provide the innovative tools and services that allow our customers to more rapidly and cost effectively advance their research and discovery initiatives.
"We look forward to both Hicep and genomic antibodies playing an important role in protein therapeutics and biomarker discovery."
