Almac

The Xcel™ array is designed for diseases in which there is not a DSA® array or in diseases where cross disease analysis or compatibility is a requirement.

For most drug developers, when developing a therapy, it is desirable to develop drugs for multiple disease indications. Being able to discover biomarkers which can be relevant to multiple indications is obviously the main objective.

The Xcel™ array is the optimal platform for biomarker discovery that enables the identification of biomarkers within multiple disease areas.

Xcel™ is a high density transcriptome based microarray built on the industry standard Affymetrix GeneChip® platform. The content of Xcel™ has been derived from high quality proprietary sequence data, as well as mining public gene expression and sequence databases

Using the same design approach as used for our range of DSA® arrays, Xcel™ array contains 97,000 transcripts; significantly more than is available on any other platform and the technology is optimised for use with Formalin Fixed Paraffin Embedded (FFPE) tissue.

All of our proprietary discovery arrays are designed with a 3′ focus providing an optimised platform for the analysis of FFPE samples.

RNA extracted from FFPE samples tends to have a shorter median transcript length and the detection of these samples on generic arrays is highly unstable and non-reproducible. By designing probe sets specific to the 3′ extremities of transcripts, a much higher detection rate is possible.

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• The Almac Xcel Array
• Investigation of molecular subtypes within FFPE breast cancer tumors using the Breast Cancer DSA poster AACR 2011
• The critical requirement of ATM function in PTEN null cell lines poster AACR 2011
• Prostate Cancer Research Poster AACR 2010
• Breast Cancer Research Poster AACR 2009