Key miRNA Profiling to Boost Company Fortunes in 2012

The coming year is set to witness dramatic growth of biotechnology companies specializing in stem cell research and drug development.

One such company is Sistemic Ltd. (Glasgow, United Kingdom), which has planned a GBP 1 million investment program for 2012. A portion of this investment is to be covered by a substantial Scottish Regional Selective Assistance (RSA) grant from Scottish Enterprise.

Sistemic’s activities are currently focused on microRNAs (miRNAs) and miRNA profiling. MicroRNAs are seen as the master controllers of the cell and, as such, Sistemic believes they provide information on the effects within a whole cell or organism rather than an isolated pathway. This systems approach means that the data produced is more indicative of the biology and more informative of actual effect. As a result, Sistemic leverages miRNA based profiling/fingerprinting to provide information rich products to companies worldwide.

Systemic has developed proprietary statistical algorithms that robustly and with a high degree of confidence analyze changes to miRNAs when a cell is perturbed by a stimulus. Together with innovative visualization techniques, Systemic is able to generate a fingerprint of a key set of miRNAs known as “key miRNAs” (kmiRs) that represent these changes accurately.

The Sistemic methodology provides a rigorous yet rapid understanding of the biological changes that occur within a cell. Resulting data, allows companies to make well-informed decisions, in a timely fashion. This enables them to develop their cell (or stem cell) therapy accordingly.

Jim Reid, CEO of Sistemic said, “Securing this support from Scottish Enterprise is a major achievement and shows great support by the Scottish Government for what we are doing. It adds to an already successful year for Sistemic, a year, which has seen us grow sales dramatically and develop our customer base in Europe, USA, Japan, and Australia. We truly have become a global company during 2011 and we look forward to relocating in the first half of 2012 to allow this success and growth to continue. It is always an exciting opportunity to be on the lookout for new employees and we are ideally placed to recruit top talent. This type of grant support is crucial to help grow successful research focused biotech companies such as ours and we will ensure we make the most of it!”

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Sistemic Ltd.