Faster drug discovery?
For pharmaceutical firms, gene-expression profiling has become a valuable tool for drug discovery. This process involves measuring the activity of a cell’s genes in response to drugs, to determine the compounds’ effectiveness, toxicity, and other characteristics. Conventional profiling methods, however, are inefficient or expensive, sometimes costing millions of dollars. Now Genometry has commercialized a high-throughput gene-expression assay developed at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, which operates at a fraction of the cost of conventional methods. It does so by using measurements of 1,000 genes to accurately and quickly estimate the activity of all the 20,000 or so genes expressed in a cell. The fast, low-cost assay allows for much larger experiments than previously possible, and for gene-expression profiling to be used much earlier in the drug-discovery process — which could speed things up, says Genometry co-founder, president, and CEO Justin Lamb, a former Broad Institute researcher. “Rather than profiling only a...