• E-mail
• Print
• Comment
• Font Size
• Digg
• del.icio.us
• Discuss article

GE Healthcare Actively Participates in Study to Advance Microarray Technology Towards Clinical Applications

Posted on: Thursday, 28 September 2006, 09:02 CDT

GE Healthcare today announced the publication of the MicroArray Quality Control (MAQC) project, a collaborative effort led by the U.S Food and Drug Administration (FDA) that included 137 participants from 51 academic, government, and commercial institutions over a two year period. GE Healthcare actively participated and led key areas of the MAQC project designed to assess the performance of seven microarray platforms in profiling the expression of two commercially available total RNA samples.

The study, published in the Sept. 8, 2006, issue of Nature Biotechnology, demonstrated that gene expression measurements generated by microarrays are highly reproducible, providing further support for their use in clinical settings. During this extensive study, more than 1,300 microarrays were processed over the two-year endeavor. For the MAQC main study, seven microarray platforms were deployed at three independent test sites and five replicates were assayed at each site using commercially available standard reference total RNA samples.

The GE Healthcare CodeLink platform detects nearly 30% more genes relative to the other microarray platforms in all total RNA samples assessed in this study (Leming Shi et al., Nat. Biotechnol. 2006, 24, 1151-1161). This high level of detection sensitivity is demonstrated in the Nature Biotechnology publications featuring CodeLink. For genes validated with alternative quantitative technologies, CodeLink detects as much as 60% more genes relative to the other commercial microarray platforms for lower expressed genes (Roger Canales et al., Nat. Biotechnol. 2006, 24, 1115-1122). In addition, the higher level of detection sensitivity for CodeLink is confirmed by external RNA control experiments in which CodeLink accurately detects transcripts at 50 femtomolar concentrations (Weida Tong et al., Nat. Biotechnol. 2006, 24, 1132-1139). In all papers, CodeLink detects more genes which will help researchers make more potential discoveries. CodeLink is an industry-leading platform in detection sensitivity and dynamic range which are two key performance attributes for microarrays.

"The MAQC study results have demonstrated that all microarray platforms perform very well with regard to precision and accuracy when laboratories follow standard operating protocols and employ proper data analysis procedures." said Richard Shippy, R&D Scientist at GE Healthcare, who co-authored four of the six scientific manuscripts published as part of the study. "Microarrays are an important tool that will be used to enable early health, drug target discovery, toxicogenomics and related fields. This study supplies valuable performance information supporting expansion of genomics into more clinical applications."

"GE Healthcare is dedicated to the success of this project and we're very proud that the expertise of our people is helping to support studies like these that prove the utility of microarrays," said Gene Cartwright, President of Molecular Diagnostics at GE Healthcare.

In an opinion piece accompanying the MAQC papers, Janet Woodcock, deputy commissioner for operations at the FDA, and Daniel Casciano of the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences noted that "It is anticipated that the MAQC project will help improve microarray technology and foster its appropriate application in discovery, development and review of FDA-regulated products."

About the Study

The MAQC project has generated a publicly available data set representing seven different microarray technologies and three different alternative quantitative platforms using the same total RNA starting material. In addition to this rich collection of baseline data the MAQC project has generated two sources of standard reference material representing commercially available human total RNA samples. The commercially available human reference RNA from the MAQC project can be used to calibrate arrays in ongoing quality control and performance validation efforts. In addition, the data set can be used for testing new data analysis and normalization algorithms to improve the microarray platforms further. The standard reference material can be used to test laboratory proficiency and will be valuable for troubleshooting microarray experiments in the field.

For more information on GE Healthcare's CodeLink microarray platform, please visit: http://www.codelinkbioarrays.com.

For access to the MAQC publications, please visit: http://www.nature.com/nbt/focus/maqc/index.html

About GE Healthcare

GE Healthcare provides transformational medical technologies and services that are shaping a new age of patient care. Our expertise in medical imaging and information technologies, medical diagnostics, patient monitoring systems, performance improvement, drug discovery, and biopharmaceutical manufacturing technologies is helping clinicians around the world re-imagine new ways to predict, diagnose, inform and treat disease, so their patients can live their lives to the fullest.

GE Healthcare's broad range of products and services enable healthcare providers to better diagnose and treat cancer, heart disease, neurological diseases, and other conditions earlier. Our vision for the future is to enable a new "early health" model of care focused on earlier diagnosis, pre-symptomatic disease detection and disease prevention. Headquartered in the United Kingdom, GE Healthcare is a $15 billion unit of General Electric Company (NYSE:GE). Worldwide, GE Healthcare employs more than 43,000 people committed to serving healthcare professionals and their patients in more than 100 countries. For more information about GE Healthcare, visit our website at www.gehealthcare.com.

Source: Business Wire

More News in this Category