PerkinElmer and Procognia, a UK-based early-stage company, last week announced an agreement to co-distribute and co-market systems for high-throughput, high-resolution analysis of the glycosylation of proteins.
The collaboration combines PerkinElmer’s Protein Array Workstation and ProScanArray scanner with Procognia’s U-c fingerprint lectin array technology.
With the partnership, PerkinElmer enters a new application space for its technology, at a relatively low price.
“It is immediately break-even,” John Danner, PerkinElmer’s vice president of life and analytical sciences, told BioCommerce Week. “This is going to be a go-to-market channel for hardware and a product that will flow in through our existing sales and distribution channels. It’s a new market and a unique opportunity for us to have such a deep application focus in conjunction with this partner.”
The partnership also illustrates the strategy PerkinElmer will follow in supporting a key revenue-growth technology — proteomics — in 2005 (see story, page 1).
“This is a model strategy that we will continue to pursue,” said Danner. “We will continue to look for other applications that will be helpful to our customer base.”
Procognia’s application will run on the Protein Array Workstation, which is manufactured by PerkinElmer, and based on technology licensed from Nextgen Sciences.
Procognia will provide its U-c fingerprint lectin array-based technology — up to 30 lectins spotted in replicate onto a nylon substrate over glass — and proprietary databases for the product suite.
The combined product will target biotechnology and pharmaceutical customers, said Danner.
“The typical customer will be biopharma companies in a variety of potential drug-development applications including things like clone selection, where the methods today typically lack the throughput and specificity of the Procognia methods and platform,” he said. The product was tested on protein therapeutics at undisclosed pharmaceutical firms, he said.
In November, Procognia, based in Maidenhead, UK, closed a $23.5 million of financing led by Apax Partners Funds. Procognia is commercializing a platform it acquired in 2002 when it purchased British biotechnology company Sense Proteomic. In early November, Procognia announced a deal with Sigma Aldrich to market human protein arrays using Procognia’s tag technology.
— Mo Krochmal ([email protected])