NEW YORK (GenomeWeb News) – Plexpress today announced it has partnered with Phalanx Biotech Group to offer a new service allowing researchers to discover, select, and validate biomarkers in a streamlined integrated workflow.
Called OneTRAC, the service profiles genome-wide expression patterns for mRNAs and microRNAs using Phalanx's OneArray microarrays to determine genes of interest and infer gene expression relationships. Once biomarker signatures are identified, target genes can be validated and further researched with Plexpress's Fast TRAC gene expression analysis platform. With OneTRAC, scientists can scale the number of profiled samples across multiple conditions and move from discovery phase to understanding the biological function of the biomarkers, Plexpress said.
"With continued interest among drug sponsors to supplement US regulatory submission with toxicogenomic data, we believe the flexibility and scalability of OneTRAC will be well received by customers investigating expression profiling at both the genome-wide and focused-gene levels," Vivien Mak, president of Phalanx, said in a statement.
Jari Rautio, CEO of Plexpress, added, "By combining the coverage breadth of OneArray microarrays and the high-throughput, multiplex capabilities of TRAC, OneTRAC offers researchers in industry and academia an integrated approach towards identifying, selecting, and validating a robust set of gene expression signatures."
Based in Helsinki, Finland, Plexpress offers high content gene expression analysis for cell biology research. In April, it raised $2.3 million.
Financial and other terms of the alliance were not disclosed.