Advances in Microarray Technology Conference

The latest Advances in Microarray Technology (AMT) Conference, held in conjunction with the Lab-on-a-Chip World Congress, highlighted the movement of the fields from the research lab into diagnostics. The conferences were held at the Herriot Watt University in Edinburgh (Scotland, UK) in May 2007, and were organized by Select Biosciences (Shelton, CT, USA).

Many presentations focused on developing methodologies and techniques for research analysis, while others were focused on using those techniques in a diagnostic setting. A lot of companies are looking at microarrays as a platform for molecular diagnostics, said Ken Browne, managing director of Select Biosciences.

Dr. Steven Bodovitz, of the biotechnology and pharmaceutical strategy consulting company Bioperspectives (San Francisco, CA, USA; www.bioperspectives.com) spoke about applications such as array-based comparative genomic hybridization (aCGH) chromatin immunoprecipitation on microarray (ChIP on chip), single nucleotide polymorphism (SNP) profiling, and microRNA (miRNA) profiling as important growth drivers.

In the '80s, there was lots of excitement in using microarrays to look for drug targets, which didn't really work with any regularity, but as the technology has matured, more mature applications such as diagnostics have started to emerge, said Dr. Bodovitz.

Mr. Browne believes this parallels the industry's increased interest in diagnostics with Siemens Medical Solutions (Erlangen, Germany), Philips Medical Systems (Best, Nederlands), and CombiMatrix (Mukilteo, WA, USA), making significant attempts to strengthen their presence in the sector.

Microarray-based diagnostic devices may not only be able to increase the speed of disease diagnosis, but may also be able to help track patients response to drugs in clinical trials and also be used as tests to develop personalized medicine.

The increasing interest in using microarrays in diagnostic devices (often in conjunction with microfluidic devices) may be ascribed to the increasingly consistent data generated by the arrays. Microarrays are now more heavily regulated in terms of the bioinformatics, which has led to more credible results being generated than when people were doing their own thing and publishing results that were very difficult to reproduce, continued Mr. Browne.

This year, the conference had more than 40 exhibitors, a number which has been growing at about 30% a year since the conference's started three years ago.


Related Links:
Herriot Watt University
Select Biosciences
Bioperspectives