Agilent Technologies and ExonHit Therapeutics to collaborate on microarray technology

US-based Agilent Technologies and French drug discovery company ExonHit Therapeutics have en-tered into a research collaboration to combine Ag-ilent's microarray platform and ExonHit's alternative RNA splicing technologies and expertise.

  This collaboration will explores the development of a microarray-based solution that will enable scientists to properly monitor the expression of splice variants.

Splice variants are variable sequences of RNA produced from the same gene in DNA, resulting in the creation of different proteins potentially affecting cel-lular regulation. The expression of splice variants can provide novel targets, may indicate disease states, and can be altered by exposure to drugs and toxins.

The companies are working together to optimise microarray design, reagent protocols and data analy-sis methods for splice variant studies. An experimental splicing array of G-protein coupled receptors, designed by ExonHit and produced by Agilent pursuant to the collaboration detected multiple isoforms of several genes, and showed good reproducibility and specificity. The companies are expected to work with early test sites to generate additional experimental results.

'Our mutual goal is to better enable alternative RNA splicing analysis using microarray technologies,' said Fran DiNuzzo, vice president and general man-ager of Agilent's Integrated Biology Solutions business unit. 'ExonHit Therapeutics has developed an impressive process for the identification of splicing patterns that point to specific targets for therapeutic intervention. By collaborating, we can define methods that deliver more informative splice-variant expression analysis for drug research and development.'