BG Medicine and Applied Biosystems to Collaborate on Molecular Medicine Research

BG Medicine Inc. and Applied Biosystems Group, an Applera Corporation business, have announced that the companies have entered into a collaboration agreement in which they will work together to enhance biomarker discovery and development.

Under the terms of the agreement, BG Medicine will integrate life science technology from Applied Biosystems into its proteomic and metabolomic systems pharmacology workflows and begin to explore applications for Applied Biosystems’ genomic tools.

The technology will be employed in several strategic initiatives and proprietary programs at BG Medicine over the next two years.

As part of this collaboration, Applied Biosystems is expected to be able to evaluate how its technology fits into emerging high-throughput platforms and how it supports the evolving requirements of customers in this field.

“With the rapid emergence of molecular medicine and biomarker-guided drug development initiatives, there is an explosive demand for biomarker discovery and validation research as well as the platforms that will deliver these biomarkers to the market,” said Pieter Muntendam, MD, President and CEO of BG Medicine.

“This broad collaboration with Applied Biosystems should allow us to jointly make important contributions to this new medical and drug development research.”

BG Medicine claims that its systems pharmacology approach can enable molecular characterization of disease states and drug responses, helping global pharmaceutical companies to make R&D decisions.

BG Medicine has also validated and implemented Applied Biosystems’ proteomic biomarker discovery tools over the past two years in an industrial setting.

The industrialization of biomarker discovery and validation is a development that is expected by the company to help advance proteomics, in conjunction with metabolomics and genomics.