Almac Diagnostics has announced a major study analysing colorectal polyp tissue samples using its novel Colorectal Cancer DSA microarray.
The DSA research tool focuses on the transcriptome of an individual disease, in this case colorectal cancer, and contains significant additional data, relevant to the disease of interest that is not available on other generic microarrays. The study will be conducted in collaboration with leading genetic researchers at Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) (in the US).
“Our novel technology has been developed to help researchers reduce discovery timelines, accelerate the validation process and ultimately deliver clinical applications in this disease setting. For researchers, our technology provides a comprehensive, long term, stable research platform,” said Paul Harkin, BSc, PhD, Professor of Molecular Oncology at the Centre for Cancer Research and Cell Biology, Queen's University, Belfast and MD and President of Almac Diagnostics.
“Down the line, this particular study aims to more accurately determine the likelihood of colorectal polyps becoming cancer. Using our proprietary technology and MGH's expertise, we have a strong foundation for developing predictive signatures that can benefit patients,” he added.
The study will use paraffin embedded samples and collection is currently underway. Tissue samples will be analysed by Almac Diagnostics over two years. Information derived from the study will be analysed by a joint Almac and MGH informatics team.
“Our research will use the DSA microarray to examine the transcriptome of colorectal polyps at a greater level of specificity and to generate information that will help us draw meaningful conclusions from our data. Eventually we hope to develop a gene expression signature that will inform both surveillance and preventative protocols for colorectal cancer," said Sridhar Ramaswamy, MD, Tucker Gosnell Investigator & Assistant Professor of Medicine, Massachusetts General Hospital Cancer Center and a Principal Investigator on the study.
DSA™ Technology
Almac Diagnostic's range of Cancer DSA research tools are novel microarrays developed to enable accelerated research in discovery, development and validation and ultimately to deliver clinical applications.
As the first microarrays based around the transcriptome of an individual disease, this technology generates significantly more information, which is reliable and relevant to the disease of interest, than is available on a generic array.
Array content has been generated through a process of sequencing to redundancy the chosen tissue and disease, followed by extensive bioinformatics analysis to create and annotate the unique, comprehensive coverage of disease and tissue specific transcriptomes. This provides researchers with all the information required to draw meaningful conclusions from their experimental data.
Based upon the gold standard Affymetrix GeneChip technology, the DSA research tools provide multiple independent measurements for each transcript and content is both reliable and reproducible.
The Colorectal Cancer DSA research tool contains 61,528 probesets covering 52,306 colorectal expressed transcripts: