Almac Diagnostics Launches Ovarian Cancer Research Tool
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Almac Diagnostics has announced the release of a new Cancer DSA™ research tool for ovarian cancer. The tool has additional disease specific information which is optimized for use with Formalin Fixed Paraffin Embedded (FFPE) tissue, an ideal platform for cancer diagnostic development.
Ovarian cancer is considered one of the most dangerous gynaecological cancers among women worldwide and is the rated the fourth most common cancer in women and claims the lives of around 4000 women in the UK each year.
Almac Diagnostics have developed a range of disease focused transcriptome based microarrays or DSA (disease specific array) research tools that are designed for use in specific cancers.
Almac’s latest DSA™ is said to be the first microarray based on the transcriptome of ovarian cancer and is designed on the Affymetrix Genechip™ platform, ensuring reliable and reproducible results.
The array was generated by a combination of extensive in-house sequencing and public data mining and as a result contains tens of thousands of transcripts not available on conventional arrays. The ability to work with both frozen and FFPE tissue combined with the disease-targeted content, means this is the most focused and biologically comprehensive platform for studying ovarian cancer now available. The ability to profile from FFPE also enables application to both current and retrospective tissue banks.
The Ovarian DSAO contains probesets representing mitochondrial transcripts, antisense transcripts, alternatively polyadenylated transcripts and novel transcripts. It will offer researchers the ability to reveal the mechanisms and pathways underlying ovarian cancer as well as to classify and sub-classify the disease and develop diagnostic, prognostic and predictive signatures.
Ultimately this could lead to clinical applications such as the development of targeted therapies and thus increasing survival rates and decreasing the amount of patients receiving unnecessary or ineffective treatments.