NEW YORK, July 30 - Microarray startup GenoSpectra said today it has tapped a former Packard BioScience president to be CEO.
Frank Witney, who was also the president of PerkinElmer Life Sciences' drug-discovery tools division, will guide GenoSpectra through the final stages of launching its fiber optics-based microarray technology, the company said.
GenoSpectra said it uses fiber optic strands to help deposit oligos onto microarray slides and develop ADMET microarrays, biomarker microarrays, extreme high-throughput screening chips, and extreme high-throughput desktop-screening stations.
"The fiber optic in our platform is used to manufacture DNA microarrays on a standard microscope slide," Victor Shi, vice president of corporate development, said in an interview with GenomeWeb in February. "The end result is the same as if you did it with a GeneMachines spotter, except for the throughput and the quality that we can deliver."
GenoSpectra is banking on the fact that its technology allows it to spot an entire chip at once rather than spot-by-spot. The other advantage is that the fiber optics allow the company to see what is being put down and perform quality control in real-time, Shi said.
The company said it will use this time-saving technique to make cheaper oligo arrays, which it plans to sell directly to customers. GenoSpectra will use presynthesized oligos and will spot them down on the glass slide. But it has not yet figured out what to charge for the arrays, Shi said.
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