As a company that develops breast cancer protein chips, Cambridge, UK-based NextGen Sciences experiences the pitfalls of proteomics research on a daily basis. One of the bottlenecks at the moment, says CEO Kevin Auton, is the need to produce enough different proteins to meet the demands of therapeutic groups both internally and for corporate clients. Resolving complex protein mixtures into their component parts is another ongoing problem. In September, NextGen Sciences launched two platforms that overcame some of these challenges.
The first release, the expressionfactory™, automates every facet of parallel protein expression and purification--from putting genes into fusion vectors and growing proteins in vivo or in vitro, to isolating and analyzing the proteins for use in subsequent applications.
Researchers at NextGen Sciences who used the system to manufacture proteins for use in breast cancer chips quickly found themselves in an informatics quagmire. "One of the things we discovered in doing ...
