GnuBIO Elucidates Oncology Target with City of Hope
Cambridge, Massachusetts (June 07, 2011) GnuBIO, Inc. (GnuBIO), www.gnubio.com a pioneer in the Desktop DNA sequencing market, announced today that it has made available the results from its initial run on the TP53 gene which encodes for the protein tumor suppressor p53. The company, has achieved read lengths of 477 bases on the amplicon, while maintaining its high level of stringency in terms of accuracy and yield. The results of the p53 experiment represent greater than 3.5X longer reads than the company’s previous publicly announced data set, last month, on a complex genomic target.
The GnuBIO desktop sequencing platform is a solution that contains onboard target capture, amplification, and DNA sequencing, thereby streamlining the laboratory workflow and decreasing the chance of technician handling errors. Thus, a technician needs only to inject a nucleic acid sample into the system, and walk away. The combination of these various processes into one system, not only alleviate the sample handling burden for diagnostic and research labs, but also decrease the overall workflow time by an order of magnitude over any alternative sequencing technologies that employ targeted gene resequencing applications.
Oncology diagnostic applications, in particular, require deep levels of coverage with high accuracy, in order to detect and quantify low allele frequency variants in a heterogeneous sample, stated Dr. Jakub Sram, Director of Business Development, City of Hope Molecular Diagnostic Laboratory. The unmet need in molecular diagnostics is to accomplish this analysis at a price point that is commercially viable, based on a per sample cost, thereby obviating the need to batch samples, Dr. Sram continued. The high fidelity of the data that we have reviewed, the workflow on the system, and the simplicity of target capture and sequencing, makes GnuBIO potentially the best sequencing solution that will meet the needs of clinical laboratories over the coming years.
We have assembled a team of exceptionally talented and dedicated individuals across a breadth of scientific disciplines, stated John Boyce, President and CEO of GnuBIO. The team, combined with the proprietary microfluidic innovations that have been developed in the Weitz laboratory at Harvard University, have allowed GnuBIO to enter the development phase of its system within a 6 month timeframe.
Tal Raz, Vice President of Molecular Biology at GnuBIO, (www.gnubio.com) will be presenting the results at the Consumer Genetics Conference (www.consumergeneticsshow.com), tomorrow June 7th, as the last talk in the Sequencing Roundtable session that begins at 4:00pm.
The GnuBIO system is projected to sell for a cost of under $50,000 USD.
About GnuBIO
GnuBIO, Inc is a private company,www.gnubio.com, and a pioneer in the field of scalable DNA sequencing technology for the Diagnostic and Applied Markets. Utilizing its proprietary microfluidic and emulsion technologies, GnuBIO will work within these markets to develop nucleic acid analysis based systems that scale as function of both patient sample and genomic region. The GnuBIO system has the capability of running numbers of samples that are in line with diagnostic and applied market endeavors for a cost that represents orders of magnitude less than current technology. The same system also has the headroom to compete in the high throughput market, and will achieve a comparable output, in hours, to what the leading technology takes weeks to produce.