NEW YORK (GenomeWeb) – The Coriell Institute for Medical Research announced today that it has licensed PluriTest — a bioinformatics assay for determining the pluripotency of human induced pluripotent stem cells — from the researchers who developed it.
The assay, originally developed in 2011 by Jeanne Loring of the Scripps Research Institute and Franz Josef Muller of the University of Kiel, uses microarray technology to identify genes in normal human embryonic cells, induced pluripotent stem cells, and non-pluripotent cells to generate a molecular model of a pluripotent stem cell line, the institute said in a statement.
PluriTest is more efficient than the teratoma assay, which is the conventional method for assessing a cell's differentiation capability, and it's also animal free, Coriell said.
"We saw a need for a method to characterize human pluripotent stem cells that was inexpensive and easy to use, without compromising the rigorous quality researchers require of their materials," Loring said in the statement.
The assay is available online through a digital interface powered by the Amazon Cloud, and more than 13,000 datasets have been analyzed with it since its publication. Coriell intends to help develop future versions of the assay with added functions and services.
Additional terms of the licensing agreement were not disclosed.