Plexpress and MediSapiens Launch OncoTRAC Gene Expression Service

Plexpress, developer of the innovative TRAC platform for high-throughput gene expression analysis, has announced a new collaboration with MediSapiens, a specialist in cloud computing, software and the user-friendly mining of vast genomic databases. The companies have launched the new OncoTRAC™ Gene Expression Service, which takes advantage of MediSapiens’ extensive IST Online Gene Expression Database to facilitate the rapid, reliable identification of relevant genes of interest.

After this initial discovery phase, the Plexpress FAST TRAC Gene Expression Analysis technology is used to assay the expression of a hand-selected 30-gene panel in a large number of samples. The unique combination of these two complimentary approaches presents a complete solution from gene discovery through to validation and in-depth study, across a wide range of drug development, biomarker discovery and life science research applications.

Tommi Pisto, CEO of MediSapiens, commented: “With a database of over 20,000 samples and 300 million data points, our MediSapiens IST Online Gene Expression Viewer is the world’s largest unified gene expression database. The new OncoTRAC Service will allow users to leverage this data to discover new genes and then investigate their biological relevance.”

Visualizing a gene’s function across all tissues and exploring relationships between expression and disease, the database allows the straightforward integration of proprietary data, whilst strict normalization also allows the comparison of results from a wide spectrum of studies. Exploration and identification of the most relevant genes of interest from a pool of samples of various cancer types, treatment-response and disease grades are subsequently compared with expression in healthy tissue, providing a knowledge-based discovery approach.

CEO of Plexpress, Dr Jari Rautio, said: “TRAC is the ideal technology for following up genomic discovery using the IST Online Gene Expression Viewer, as it allows the multiplex analysis of up to 30 genes in hundreds to thousands of samples. In this way, researchers can really investigate the biology of their system in considerable depth, without sacrificing the number of genes they can assay in each sample.”

The other benefits of the fully automatable TRAC process include increased assay speed, as well as reduced technical variation, hands-on time and assay cost when compared with similar methods such as qPCR and microarray analysis. While TRAC offers the flexibility to create custom gene panels, pre-validated catalogue libraries are also available for specific applications such as ADME-Tox studies, ready for rapid, ‘off-the-shelf’ utilization.