基龍米克斯 成功邁進中國大陸 工商時報 台北訊 2014年04月08日 04:10基龍米克斯在台灣基因體定序市場領先群倫，去年於上海張江高科園區成立獨資的上海基龍子公司，今年更在中國基因體個體化醫學研究及高端藥物研究開發市場再下一城，完成三項關鍵成就，將為今後業績成長及大陸戰略發展，奠下成功基礎。首先，基龍米克斯與全球領先數位化基因體公司RainDance Technologies，於4月1日擴大原來大中華代理合約，除延長標靶基因體定序服務（ThunderStorm Service）代理權外，於數位式PCR（RainDrop）代理權，除原來台灣及華東四省一市（上海）區域外，更擴大含蓋華南，西南，及東北等其他12個省份。其次，基龍米克斯將在4月份開始在上海張江高科的實驗室，建置亞洲唯一的標靶基因體定序平台（RainDance ThunderStorm）服務大中華及亞太的客戶。此外，基龍米克斯已於今年第1季開始，建置亞洲唯一由美國Broad Institute所開發的高速藥物篩選平台－L1000。L1000是以豐富的基因轉錄體資料庫為基礎，適用於老藥新用及中草藥藥物篩選。該公司整合轉譯醫學上的多項技術平台，搭配最新的基因體定序平台及數位式PCR，提供大陸醫學及研究市場極佳的檢測平台。
GENOMETRY, INC is a platform-technology company founded by a multidisciplinary team of genome scientists to commercialize a revolutionary genome-wide high-throughput low-cost gene-expression profiling method (L1000) for next-generation pharmaceutical discovery applications. L1000™ Expression Profiling produces high-dimensional gene-expression profiles from crude cell lysates in 384-well plate format at a rate of thousands a day, and at only a fraction of the cost of conventional microarray-based methods. This enables the use of expression profiling at a scale never before possible. GENOMETRY is the sole provider of commercial gene-expression profiling services using L1000. We offer data-generation and primary analysis solutions to the pharmaceutical and biotechnology industries, non-profit organizations, and academic researchers from a dedicated facility in Kendall Square, Cambridge MA, for large-scale or rapid-turnaround applications including small-molecule screening; hit, allele, and library characterization and de-duplication; and MOA and SAR elucidation. GENOMETRY is also pioneering a digital open innovation™ platform in partnership with pharmaceutical companies, synthesis shops, library vendors, and other owners of proprietary chemistry. By coupling our unique library-digitization capability with a Google-like search engine, GENOMETRY engages the global biomedical-research community in the drug-discovery enterprise. Individual researchers find potential chemical solutions for their chosen biological problems, and professional drug-development partners. And the owners of those compounds find new uses for existing chemical assets, and committed domain-expert collaborators to help prosecute those projects. A world's worth of unmet medical needs and a wealth of unexploited drug-like chemistry are thus brought together in GENOMETRY's crowd-sourced drug discovery™ solution.
Connectivity Map is a collection of microarray-derived gene-expression profiles from cultured human cells treated with many hundreds of known drugs, coupled with a dedicated pattern-matching data-mining algorithm, created by GENOMETRY's founders while at the Broad Institute. It was designed to test the principle of using gene-expression profiling as a universal functional bioassay, and to demonstrate that drug screening could be performed entirely in silico simply by matching diseases with small molecules through the transitive property of common or reciprocal gene-expression changes (Lamb et al, Science 2006; Lamb, Nature Reviews Cancer 2007). Clinical colleagues and collaborators provided the first successful example of this approach by using Connectivity Map to find a drug capable of reversing glucocorticoid resistance in acute lymphoblastic leukemia (Wei et al, Cancer Cell 2006). Gene-Expression Based Small-Molecule Screening The disease of interest is represented by the list of genes found to be aberrantly expressed in tissue specimens or a faithful model system. A library of small molecules is screened for compounds increasing the levels of down-regulated genes, and decreasing the levels of up-regulated genes in suitable cell lines. Connectivity Map also demonstrated the principle and power of digitizing, distributing, and democratizing the drug-screening process. We made our database of small-molecule gene-expression profiles and our search algorithm freely available on the internet, and discovered the global biomedical research community to have an enormous appetite to mine these data. Thousands of scientists with world-leading disease-specific expertise, unique secondary assay systems, and rare patient populations, but without any access to small-molecule libraries and physical screening capabilities (or the budget to use them) now had a new way to screen for drugs. This approach has been described as "Google for drug discovery" (The Independent 2006). This is because just like typing a word or phrase into a traditional internet search engine and being presented with a list of websites relevant to that input, users of Connectivity Map upload a list of genes characterizing their disease of interest, and with one click of their mouse see a list of small molecules ranked by their affect on those genes. These compounds are potential modulators of the disease. The self-service discovery paradigm has now been applied successfully in dozens of published cases, and has led to the identification of agents with in vivo proof-of-concept against pathologies as diverse as skeletal muscle atrophy (Kunkel et al, Cell Metabolism 2011), hair loss (Ishimatsu-Tsuji et al, FASEB J 2009), and inflammatory bowel disease (Dudley et al, Science Translational Medicine 2011). GENOMETRY is now creating an enterprise version of Connectivity Map. The online search capability remains free and unrestricted, but the size of the database will be greatly expanded, and will contain gene-expression profiles of hundreds of thousands of proprietary compounds from pharmaceutical companies and other sources of novel drug-like chemistry. GENOMETRY also serves as the honest broker between the users of our search engine and the owners of the small molecules in our database to establish material-transfer, collaboration, partnership, or licensing agreements under which to pursue and co-develop promising connections. GENOMETRY thus serves as the online matchmaker between drugs and diseases. GENOMETRY offers library-scale gene-expression profiling using L1000, and provides public access to those profiles through our search engine (without structures or other identifiers), with optional hit evaluation and triage, on a partnership or fee-for-service basis, as an integrated digital open innovation™ solution to all owners of proprietary chemistry. We invite inquiries from pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies, chemical-synthesis companies, small-molecule library vendors, curators of natural-product collections, and all entities in possession of novel potential drug substances.
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