Fostering Personalized Medicine

Imagine receiving a cancer diagnosis, and with it a laboratory report that identifies the biological makeup of your cancer, as well as a drug therapy regimen that is designed specifically to attack that cancer and repair your body. Robust sequencing capabilities are critical to the advancement of personalized medicine, as the treatment of disease shifts to therapies that are specific to an individual’s unique genetic makeup.

Our SOLiD™ 3 System is the latest in a quickly evolving instrument line for genomic sequencing that is to genomics what the laptop was to a mainframe computer—smaller, faster, and more adaptable. The SOLiD™ 3 System enables scientists to sequence a human genome for less than $10,000, with a roadmap that will increasingly drive capabilities toward the $1,000 genome milestone.

With instruments that unlock the secrets of our DNA, and products and services that advance the promise of regenerative science, we are helping usher in an era of personalized medicine.

Partnerships to advance personalized medicine

Researchers at Translational Genomics Research Institute (TGen) have partnered with Life Technologies to translate scientific discoveries at the genetic level into knowledge about the underlying causes of disease. The alliance enables TGen researchers to apply best-of-breed sequencing technology across a broad spectrum of research efforts that focus on developing a more personalized approach to medicine. This approach represents a potential clinical shift from treatment of disease based on symptoms, to therapy that is specific to an individual’s unique genetic makeup. Among the goals of this project is to advance the promise of personalized medicine by reducing the cost of genome sequencing to make it a routine tool in medical care.

Researchers at the Mayo Clinic are using the SOLiD™ 3 System to generate data to better evaluate possible advantages of sequencing-based approaches to assist in evaluation of potential biomarkers in head and neck cancer—genetic variations that may ultimately reveal the underlying mechanism of cancer development so that it might one day be preventable.

Disease Spotlight:

ALS (Lou Gehrig’s Disease)

Providing expertise for testing in preclinical research concepts more

Life Technologies, the University of California, San Diego, and The Salk Institute for Biological Studies have initiated studies for the development of cell transplant therapy for amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS). Currently there is only one FDA-approved pharmaceutical addressing this lethal disease, which affects approximately 30,000 people in the United States.

Life Technologies is providing support through its expertise in stem cell biology, cell separation, next-generation sequencing, and bioproduction, to help teams test their preclinical research concepts.


Autism

Donating our instruments to diagnose ASD more

A team led by Dr. Stephen Scherer at The Hospital for Sick Children (SickKids) was granted $8.9 million from the Global Leadership Round in Genomics & Life Sciences in Canada to study the genomic basis of ASD.

The project, called “Autism Spectrum and Associated Neurodevelopmental Disorders: Genomes to Outcomes,” is geared toward developing cutting-edge technologies to diagnose ASD and other neurological disorders. Scientists currently are using this technology to sequence genes from thousands of ASD patients in Ontario. It is the largest study of its kind. Life Technologies donated a $700,000 next generation SOLiD® system to the project.


Schinzel-Giedion

The first study to decipher the cause of a dominant human disease more

New research published in Nature Genetics sheds light on Schinzel-Giedion, an extremely rare and fatal disorder with only 50 diagnosed cases worldwide. Children with Schinzel-Giedion usually do not survive past the age of ten. Geneticists from the Radboud University Nijmegen Medical Center (RUNMC) in The Netherlands used the Life Technologies SOLiD® System to pinpoint the disease’s cause: a spontaneous mutation in a parent’s germ cell line, in a gene called SETBP1. This is the first study to decipher the cause of a dominant human disease by sequencing the protein-coding sections of the human genome (exome).
Schizophrenia

Seeking to understand the cause of this complex disease more

Life Technologies and EdgeBio are partnering with researchers at Virginia Commonwealth University (VCU) to study the impact of gene regulation in the development of schizophrenia. The project is using the SOLiD® System and MethylMiner™ Methylated DNA Enrichment Kit to search for methylation patterns associated with schizophrenia in the hope of better understanding the cause of this complex disease.