Seegene awarded patent in the U.S. and Europe for Annealing Control Primer

Seegene, Inc., a leader in multi-pathogen diagnostic testing, today announced that it has been awarded patent in the U.S. and Europe for Annealing Control Primer (ACP), a new technology for amplifying a specific region of a gene with much higher specificity and reproducibility than conventional approaches.

The success of PCR gene amplification rests on the specificity with which a primer anneals, or binds, to nucleic acids. The major limitation of primers in use today is that the high rate with which they anneal to non-specific targets and fail to distinguish target nucleic acids, leading to false positive test results. Therefore, there is an urgent need in the diagnostics testing community for a primer that greatly improves annealing specificity to generate true test results.

Seegene's novel ACP promises to overcome the limitations of conventional primers, significantly reduce associated false PCR test results and in the process open new applications in all fields of gene amplification-based technology. ACP is already in use commercially under the brand GeneFishing™ and DNA Walking SpeedUp™ for the discovery of differentially expressed genes (DEGs) and the detection of unknown genetic sequences, respectively.