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Protea Inks Cancer Analysis Alliance with MSKCC, Dana-Farber

NEW YORK (GenomeWeb) – Protea Biosciences Group said today that it has undertaken a collaborative research effort with Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center and the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute with an initial focus on lung cancer.

The partners will use Protea's next generation LAESI (Laser Ablation Electrospray Ionization) direct molecular imaging technology to analyze cancer cells. Protea said they will "generate molecular data profiles of cancer cells in tissue and biofluids to improve the understanding of a cancer's origin."

Further terms of the alliance were not disclosed.

"In the future we anticipate applying our direct molecular profiling technology to other tissue sample types, including 3 dimensional cell cultures and synthetic biology tissues, to provide comprehensive molecular profiling of tumors rapidly and directly," Protea CEO Steve Turner said in a statemement.

Protea's LAESI is used with mass spectrometry to detect the presence of more than a thousand distinct molecules from a single analysis of samples that can include tissues, cells, fluids, and agricultural specimens, among other sample types.

Earlier this year George Washington University said that it and collaborators, including Protea Biosciences, had received $14.6 million from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency to develop an approach to rapidly identify the mechanisms of biological and chemical threats. That collaboration will use the LAESI platform.