Applied Biosystems Announces Co-Development Agreement with Olink Bioscience
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Applied Biosystems has announced that it has signed an exclusive license and collaboration agreement with Olink Bioscience to commercialize Olink’s proximity ligation assay (PLA) technology.
Under the agreement, Applied Biosystems will co-develop the PLA technology for specific applications in the life science research market that include biomarker validation and characterization of complex biological processes. Financial terms of the agreement were not disclosed.
PLA is a sensitive assay that utilizes two oligonucleotide-labeled antibodies, DNA ligation, and nucleic acid amplification to detect proteins, their modifications, and their interactions in limited samples.
Applied Biosystems believes the PLA technology will provide researchers with a method for protein analysis that combines antibodies for protein recognition with DNA amplification for analytical quantitation. The technique is expected to be applied to areas in which the correlation of gene expression and protein data can bring better understanding of biological processes.
As part of the co-development agreement, Applied Biosystems will develop products for in vitro – in a controlled environment – applications of PLA. These products will combine the protein detection features of the PLA method with the quantitative precision of TaqMan® reagents on Applied Biosystems’ real-time polymerase chain reaction (PCR) systems.
The utilization of PLA technology should allow scientists to conduct protein expression studies using reagents and instruments for genotyping and gene expression analysis.
The PLA method can also be embodied for in situ - in natural state - applications for direct detection in cells or tissues. For in situ applications, the PLA technology utilizes two oligo-labeled antibodies and rolling circle amplification (RCA) with visualization by microscopy to offer a quantitative alternative to immunohistochemistry - a visualization technique to localize target proteins in fixed samples.
In this agreement, Olink retains rights to certain incarnations of the PLA technology including in situ applications in the life science research market, and all rights in the area of in vitro diagnostics. This includes Olink’s recently released the Duolink™ Reagent kit, a universal kit enabling the in situ detection of molecular interactions and fluorescence imaging.
