New Microarray Technology

Moxtek, a nano-photonics company, today announced that it has reached a collaboration agreement with Philips Research to develop a new wire grid microarray chip (WGM) that has been designed to offer ultra-high surface specificity and excellent suppression of background signals. The WGM is based on a wire grid pattern on a glass substrate.

The WGM technology provides the potential for rapid quantitative detection with improved accuracy, of biomolecules such as proteins and nucleic acids. In addition, the technology promises to significantly simplify the work flow and improve the reproducibility for such tests by removing the washing step and performing hybridization and detection in parallel. These strengths match with the needs for advanced microarray technology in life sciences research. Rapid molecular detection for life sciences research is a fast-growing market, and could revolutionize healthcare research.

The WGM is based on illumination of a grid of metal nanowires with polarized excitation light and detecting the fluorescence generated by fluorescently labeled target molecules bound to capture probes on the substrate between the metal nanowires. The detection volume is limited to ~20 nm above the surface, and can be controlled via the dimensions of the nanowires and the excitation wavelength. The surface specific detection of the WGM provides a significant reduction in microarray workflow by making redundant the chip washing step; moreover, it has been shown to allow monitoring the binding of bio-molecules to the substrate in real-time.

Control of the polarization state enables using the wire grid microarray concept for both highly surface specific measurements and “conventional” measurements where the measurement volume is determined by the optical set-up rather than the geometry of the wire grid. This versatile technique has been designed to be compatible with commercial optical microarray readers currently available on the market.

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The Perfect database to consult for SNP, Knockout/Knockdown related studies

Last week the XTractor Premium Knowledgebase has clocked 150,000 manually categorized biomedical facts.

The knowledgebase currently grows at a rate of more than 700 facts every single day from PubMed and covers information on Biomarkers, Disease mechanisms, Clinical Trials, polymorphisms, mutations, knockouts and pathways.

The knowledgebase recently crossed landmark of more 10000 relationships on knockout and mutation studies alone in XTractor.

• Knockout/Knockdown related facts: 10132
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So not only you get the most relavant scientific facts everyday but also individual uptodate knowledge on knockouts, mutations, biomarkers , SNP and so on…

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XTractor Premium for scientists to access data stored in PubMed says Knowledgespeak

Life sciences informatics company Molecular Connections, India, has announced the availability of XTractor Premium, a knowledge management platform, for the biomedical research community. The product is projected to provide scientists with new and refined ways to access the latest scientific facts from PubMed. Pharmaceutical companies, researchers and scientists can use the platform to identify, verify and develop predictive relationships from PubMed Literature.

Leveraging the ability to transform data to knowledge and to assist experts is seen to be crucial to the success of research investigation today. XTractor Premium offers several enhancements over the beta version in managing large volume of published biomedical data to accelerate decision making.

The XTractor knowledgebase currently contains 150,000 relationships on biomarkers, clinical trials, pathways, knockout studies, mutations, drug interactions and disease mechanisms. The knowledgebase is updated everyday with manually annotated relationships from the latest PUBMED publications. Other premium features include semantic search functionality; concept linking; bibliographic search; and the option to save and export data in user-friendly formats.

Qiagen Provides Solutions for Swine Flu Surveillance

Qiagen has announced that two of its tests can be used to screen for the swine flu virus. Data analysis of the viral gene sequences showed that the artus Influenza LC RT PCR Kit and the Resplex II 2.0 Kit, can be used to detect whether or not Influenza A virus sequences are present in a sample, including the H1N1 subtype. If the sample proves positive, treatment with medication such as Tamiflu or Relenza can be prescribed, according to the recommendations given by the corresponding drug manufacturers.

"We have compared the swine fever virus' sequence with our assays. The primers, which define the starting and end points of a genetic sequence that is amplified to make the target sequence visible, match 100 percent for the artus kit and almost 100 percent for the Resplex kit", said Dr Thomas Grewing, senior director, R&D. "We are now working closely with reference institutions to have both assays further re-validated and optimized based on clinical samples".

Both test kits are for research use only. They have not been cleared or approved by authorities including the United States Food and Drug Administration or any other regulatory agency in the United States, or under the European IVD Directive, for human diagnostic or other clinical use, and are not intended and should not be used for human diagnostic or any other clinical purposes.

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The XTractor Premium Knowledgebase surpasses 150000 mark

XTractor Premium - a platform for discovery, analysis and modelling of published biomedical facts. The application also comes with -XTractor Premium Knowledgebase - the only knowledgebase, which provides "manually" annotated facts from PubMed on a daily basis.The XTractor Premium Knowledgebase now has more than 150000 relationships.

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Tracking common gene polymorphisms across multiple Diseases with XTractor Premium

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Mayo Clinic, Microsoft Team on Patient Health Record Plus

Mayo Clinic is extending its brand across the country. This time, it is offering a free personal health record on the Microsoft HealthVault platform. The Mayo Clinical Health Manager, as the PHR is known, will provide not only a secure place to store medical records online, but also guidance from Mayo experts that will be tailored to the information contained in that PHR. If you are a 50-year-old man with diabetes and hypertension, for example, you will receive information about how you should take care of those conditions and the tests you should receive.

Initially, Mayo Clinic Health Manager will include tools and features that help consumers manage pediatric and adult wellness, immunizations, pregnancy and asthma. Forthcoming features will help users with type 2 diabetes, high cholesterol, and/or high blood pressure.

According to Mayo’s press kit, PHR users will be able to “transfer data directly into [a] Mayo Clinic Health Manager profile from a wide range of providers, devices (such as blood pressure cuffs or glucose monitors), pharmacies and health plans connected to Microsoft HealthVault.” But curiously, the Mayo Clinic’s own patients cannot yet upload their medical records to the PHR, according to Mayo spokesperson Ginger Plumbo. “We’re working on it,” she added, noting that that the group hopes to clear away the technical obstacles before the end of the year.

Microsoft HealthVault, like Google Health, has not been very successful so far in getting healthcare providers to share their clinical information online with their patients. Dr. Bill Crounse, senior director of worldwide health for Microsoft, told BNET recently that HealthVault won’t realize its full potential until it includes clinical data. One healthcare system that recently took a big step in that direction is the New York- Presbyterian Hospital, which is using Microsoft’s Amalga software to pull together patient data from its disparate systems for its own PHR on the HealthVault platform. The free PHR is now available to cardiology and cardiac surgery patients at the NYP Hospital/Columbia University Medical Center in New York.

Getting back to the Mayo Clinic, much of the information that will be made available to its PHR users will come from the massive consumer health library that the group first posted on the Internet in 1995 at www.mayoclinic.com. That free resource reinforced Mayo’s reputation as a premier source of reliable healthcare information on the web.

Meanwhile, Mayo has also partnered with IBM to accelerate research on natural language processing (NLP) through an open-source collaboration involving about 2,000 researchers and developers. Eventually, it is hoped, NLP will enable physicians to retrieve the exact information they are seeking from health records.

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