Sage-N Research Gains Rights to Sell SEQUEST Proteomic Search Engine
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Sage-N Research, Inc. has been granted a sublicense from Thermo Fisher Scientific Inc. to sell SEQUEST® search engine products worldwide.
The agreement provides for Sage-N to develop and sell products using the patented proteomic search engine technology. Sage-N becomes the first company to join Thermo as the only companies licensed by the University of Washington to commercialize their SEQUEST technology, which embodies intellectual property described in US Patent 5538897 covering all proteomic search engines.
Researchers who use mass spectrometry in cancer research and drug discovery will benefit from new SEQUEST-based products resulting from this agreement. They routinely identify proteins and protein modifications that interact with known molecular targets in blood and tissue samples.
The proteins of interest are often phosphorylated or otherwise modified and of low abundance. SEQUEST is renowned for sensitivity in identifying modified proteins of low abundance, even from spectral data of poor quality.
“Proteomics technology holds great promise to uncover medical breakthroughs at the molecular level,” said Dr. John R. Yates, III, professor at the Scripps Research Institute (La Jolla, California) and primary inventor of the SEQUEST technology. “The participation of an innovative company such as Sage-N Research will help drive the promise to reality.”
Sage-N uses SEQUEST technology as an embedded component within plug and play productivity solutions. The popular Sorcerer™ integrated data appliance (IDA) systems are turnkey analysis instruments incorporating a version of SEQUEST integrated within a robust, high throughput, and automated workflow. They are the only high throughput SEQUEST solutions that can be set up in minutes, require little or no computer maintenance, and can search gigabytes of raw mass spectrometry files per hour.
Core proteomics facilities benefit from the automation and easy sharing of results with clients. Advanced research laboratories can ramp up a high throughput workflow, all the way through to validated results, with data analysis that is optimized for sensitive mass spectrometry.
The Sage-N proprietary SORCERER-SEQUEST™ search engine has been re-designed from the ground up to use the latest software and computer hardware technologies that emerged since the original SEQUEST software was developed. It includes several patent-pending innovations, including searching variable modifications on the fly with indexed databases, and it is said to be the first SEQUEST implementation designed to run on multi-core CPUs.
SORCERER-SEQUEST is optimized for Orbitrap mass spectrometers with an isotope search mode, and with automated reversed peptide generation for decoy database strategies that estimate False Positive rates while maximizing sensitivity.
Future products are planned to incorporate application-optimized versions of the base SEQUEST technology in focus areas such as biomarker discovery for drug efficacy and safety, phosphorylation site localization for cancer research, and real-time protein identification within the mass spectrometer.
Sage-N invites interested corporate and academic researchers to contact Sage-N directly for opportunities to co-develop leadership products and services.
