Applied Biosystems Announces New Molecular Tools to Speed Drug Discovery Research

Applied Biosystems has announced the release of a new series of TaqMan® Gene Signature Panels for accelerating drug discovery research.

Applied Biosystems says that it has developed these TaqMan arrays because pharmaceutical companies are increasingly working to develop new drugs designed to interfere with or modulate interactions between proteins that play critical roles in both disease progression and response to treatment.

By investigating changes in the expression of genes that code for these kinds of proteins, researchers can identify potential new drug targets, validate known targets, and screen samples during drug development.

The TaqMan Low Density Array Gene Signature Panels can enable researchers to simultaneously observe and determine the expression level of genes that encode proteins involved with critical cellular functions. Many key genes are expressed at low levels, making them difficult to observe.

According to Company, in order to detect genes expressed at low levels, researchers need an extremely sensitive technology such as these TaqMan arrays that can detect very few copies of nucleic acids present in a sample.

“The sensitivity of these new TaqMan arrays should make it possible for researchers to evaluate expression changes in genes normally expressed at levels too low to observe using other methods,” said Carl Hull, vice president and general manager for the sequence detection systems and microarrays business units of Applied Biosystems.

“The result is that we can help pharmaceutical companies to better select which targets and which samples to study further as part of their drug target discovery and development programs.”