NEW YORK (GenomeWeb) – Olink Proteomics said today that it has opened new office and laboratory facilities in Watertown, Massachusetts, marking its expansion into the US and the establishment of its first major facility outside of Sweden.
The company said its new US-based organization will focus on driving US sales of its Proseek Multiplex platform for targeted human protein biomarker discovery. In April, Uppsala, Sweden-based Olink announced it had reorganized into two separate firms, Olink Proteomics and Olink Bioscience, with the former taking the Proseek platform and the latter the rest of the company's IP, including methods for genomic and in situ protein analysis.
Proseek is based on Olink's proximity elongation assay (PEA), which uses pairs of antibodies linked to DNA strands that are brought into proximity upon antibody binding. They are then extended by a DNA polymerase that creates a new sequence that can be used as a surrogate marker for the target protein.
Olink began selling Proseek as a single-plex assay in 2011, launching a 96-plex version in March 2013. In 2014, the company signed a co-marketing deal with Fluidigm to offer the 96-plex assay on Fluidigm's BioMark HD real-time PCR platform — this allows researchers to measure the levels of up to 92 proteins in as many as 96 samples in a single run.
“We are thrilled to be able to announce the opening of our new facilities in Watertown, and with it, the launch of a complete US organization," Olink Proteomics President and CEO Jon Heimer said in a statement. "The [US] has always been at the forefront of Olink’s strategic plans based on a rapidly growing demand from our important customers here."