BIOCRATES Life Sciences AG launches Absolute<i>IDQ</i>™ Kit for Metabolomics at Analytica in Munich

BIOCRATES Life Sciences AG, a leading metabolomics company, is launching their AbsoluteIDQ Kit, an innovative breakthrough for quantitative metabolomics. BIOCRATES will be presenting the kit at Analytica 2008 in Munich, Germany, Hall A3, Stand 423.

The AbsoluteIDQ Kit is designed to be used with standard triple quadrupole mass spectrometers, allowing customers to keep their proprietary data in-house. Currently the AbsoluteIDQ Kit is optimized for Applied Biosystems API 4000™ and 4000 Q TRAP^® LC/MS/MS Systems. The first kit version, p150, allows customers to accurately measure and identify more than a 150 metabolites in over 4 compound classes from their valuable clinical and pre-clinical plasma samples in just a few minutes per sample. The kits will initially only be offered in Europe, but there are plans to expand distribution to the US and Asia. The MetIQ™ software package is an integral part of the AbsoluteIDQ Kit and provides a solution for the complete analytical process of targeted metabolomics, from project setup to calculation of metabolite concentrations. Future kits will include products with broader metabolite analysis as well as more focused kits for specific disease indications. Klaus Weinberger, CSO of BIOCRATES, stated, “We are excited to launch our robust, targeted metabolomics kits at Analytica 2008 in Munich. We have seen early interest in the kits from a number of companies and research institutes. We expect the kits to become a routine part of pre-clinical and clinical analysis in the future.”

Applications of the kit span from drug efficacy and toxicology to biomarker research & diagnostics and from fermentation optimisation to nutritional & functional food analysis. Some of the advantages of the AbsoluteIDQ Kit include:

• Improved drug design and disease diagnosis by discovering and validating valuable markers of disease, drug efficacy, and toxicology
• Early and accurate monitoring of efficacy and side effects of investigational or approved drugs; this means being able to halt development of non-efficacious drugs quickly and accelerate promising drug candidates to the market
• Reduced costs for targeted metabolomics
• Reduced sample volumes. The small volume needed gives labs the ability to move metabolomics to small-animal models and take multiple time points
• The ability to obtain absolute concentrations of metabolites, not relative concentrations;
  this yields a reliable, repeatable, and robust platform for performing targeted metabolomics

In addition to selling metabolomic kits, BIOCRATES offers contract research services and works in collaboration with its partners to deliver the most trusted targeted metabolomics information in the industry. BIOCRATES has broad expertise in metabolomics method development, bioinformatics software and analytics, and data interpretation. Their TargetIDQ™ Services provide customers direct access to this expertise, enabling identification and quantification of hundreds of metabolites from a broad range of samples, ultimately revealing meaningful biomarkers. As part of BIOCRATES’ proprietary service offering, customers also gain access to outputs from their proprietary MarkerIDQ™ software. MarkerIDQ enables mass-spectrometry data to be mapped onto metabolic pathways, metabolomics measurements to be clearly displayed and visualized, and pathways to be represented graphically and dynamically, leading to improved data interpretation and study results. For more information about our kits and contract research services, please visit the article webpage.