NEW YORK (GenomeWeb News) – Horizon Discovery today announced a collaboration with Promega to develop next-generation predictive human disease models.
The partnership, it said, centers on delivering "endogenous gene reporting capabilities in the form of Promega's luciferase and HaloTag reporter technologies" combined with Horizon Discovery's homologous recombination-based precision genome editing technology called rAAV Genesis.
The goal of the partnership, it added, is to develop disease models, "recapitulating genetic mutations exactly as they occur in patient tumors, thereby enabling the elucidation of protein expression and protein-protein interactions encoded by those mutations."
Horizon Discovery has reconstituted more than 370 cancer mutations and variations in human cell lines using its rAAV Genesis platform. The mutations and variations serve as patient-relevant, predictive in vitro models of genetic disease.
The firms also plan to enable the study of tumor response to treatments in real-time, by offering in vivo xenografts of Horizon Discovery's tumorigenic engineered isogenic cell lines that have been incorporated with Promega reporter tags.
Financial and other terms of the deal were not disclosed.