Almac Diagnostics has today announced the release of a new Cancer DSA™ research tool for ovarian cancer. The tool has additional disease specific information, which is optimised 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 in the UK.
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 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 that this is the most focused and biologically comprehensive platform for studying ovarian cancer available. The ability to profile from FFPE also enables application to both current and retrospective tissue banks.
The ovarian DSA 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 number of patients receiving unnecessary or ineffective treatments.
Professor Paul Harkin, president and managing director of Almac Diagnostics, said: “With over 6,000 cases of ovarian cancer diagnosed in the US every year, the application of our DSA technology will not only ensure a greater understanding of the mechanisms of the disease, but also improve the provision of solutions for the oncology market and the progression of targeted treatment for the advancement of patient care. Our Ovarian DSA is now the most advanced platform for studying ovarian cancer and could ultimately lead to the development of targeted therapies to tackle the disease.”
To date, Almac have developed DSA research tools for colorectal, lung, breast, prostate and ovarian cancer.
