NEW YORK (GenomeWeb) – Agilent Technologies and biotechnology company SomaLogic announced today that they have signed a multi-year supply agreement for Agilent to provide customized high-fidelity oligo microarrays for the nucleic acid detection step in SomaLogic's Somascan assay.
Specific terms of the deal were not disclosed.
The SomaScan assay is a protein measurement platform with applications in basic and clinical research, diagnostics, and pharmaceutical discovery and development, the companies said. It solves the problem of protein measurement using a DNA measurement solution. The customized Agilent microarray will be used as part of a step to enable the assay to detect and measure 5,000 proteins accurately and reproducibly from a small volume of biological sample.
"Agilent and SomaLogic have developed a mutually rewarding partnership over the years, and we are pleased that they will continue to leverage our microarray platform as they scale up their business," Sam Raha, president of Agilent's diagnostics and genomics group, said in a statement. "Agilent's microarray platform has demonstrated superiority for measurement of DNA and RNA at scale and it is exciting to see how SomaLogic is creatively applying this capability to measure thousands of proteins in a single assay."
SomaLogic CEO Roy Smythe also noted that the company has analyzed more than 300,000 human samples to date as it has worked to build the SomaScan platform, and that Agilent's custom microarrays will help the firm as it scales into health, wellness, and disease monitoring applications for the technology.