NEW YORK (GenomeWeb News) – Thermo Fisher Scientific's Biomarker Research Initiatives in Mass Spectrometry (BRIMS) Center will collaborate with NextGen Sciences to apply new technologies to that company's biomarker assay services, Thermo announced today.
The BRIMS Center will work with NextGen Sciences to add new technologies to the company's biomarkerexpress platform — a set of biomarker services that rely on a mass spectrometry-based approach called selected reaction monitoring to assay proteins and peptides in biofluids and tissues.
Under the new agreement, NextGen Sciences will have access to the most recent Thermo Scientific mass spec technology. NextGen Sciences' biomarkerexpress workflow already includes several Thermo Fisher platforms and software.
"The combination of Orbitrap technology and triple quad capability enables NextGen Sciences to go from discovery or named proteins to a single or multi-protein assay in a very short timeframe," Michael Pisano, CEO of Ann Arbor, Mich.-based NextGen Sciences, said in a statement.
Over the past year, BRIMS and NextGen Sciences have also been collaborating on the development of osteoarthritis biomarkers. NextGen Sciences is currently testing osteoarthritis biomarker candidates in synovial fluid in 1,000 patient samples provided by Harvard Medical School. Those potential biomarkers were originally discovered through research at Harvard and Case Western Reserve University.
NextGen Sciences also is developing biomarker panels for a range of other diseases, including Alzheimer's disease and several types of cancer.