Almac wins top award at Tech Idol Showcase

Almac Diagnostic Services’ Cancer DSA™ platform has won the award for the Best New Technology at the Tech Idol Showcase event held at the 2007 ‘Discovery 2 Diagnostics’ conference in Pennsylvania. The Tech Idol Showcase competition features presentations of cutting edge Diagnostics technologies and Almac’s DSA™ research tool was judged to be the best new technology this year. Cancer DSA™ research tools are novel microarrays developed to enable accelerated research in discovery, development and validation and ultimately to deliver clinical applications. The Cancer DSA™ research tools are designed to work with both fresh frozen and paraffin embedded tissue, allowing application of this unique microarray technology to current clinical practice and retrospective tissue banks.

An independent panel of judges was assembled by IBC Conferences to evaluate the new technologies presented based on their functionality and application. Almac Diagnostic Services will now be invited to give a podium presentation during the 2008 ‘Discovery 2 Diagnostics’.

Professor Paul Harkin, President & Managing Director of Almac Diagnostic Services said: “Among other things, our work on microarrays will ensure an increasingly effective cancer research process. At Almac, we are committed to the delivery of superior solutions for the advancement of human health solutions and this award recognises our world-leading work in this field.”

Kevin Ellison, Almac Diagnostic Services Business Development Manager said: “We are extremely pleased to have won this award which recognises our Cancer DSA™ as the premier micorarray platform for cancer research. We look forward to presenting full details of our work on microarrays at the conference next year”

Ends

Contact

UK:	USA:
Pamela Trickett	Kevin Ellison
Almac Group	Almac Diagnostic Services
02838 337575	(919) 294-0234
[email protected]	[email protected]

Notes to editors

Cancer DSA™ Technology

Almac Diagnostic’s range of Cancer DSA™ research tools are novel microarrays developed to enable accelerated research in discovery, development and validation and ultimately to deliver clinical applications.

As the first microarrays based around the transcriptome of an individual disease, this technology generates significantly more information, which is reliable and relevant to the disease of interest, than is available on a generic array.

Cancer DSA™ research tools are designed to work with both fresh frozen and paraffin embedded tissue, allowing application of this unique microarray technology to current clinical practice and retrospective tissue banks.

Array content has been generated through a process of high throughput sequencing of the chosen tissue and disease, followed by extensive bioinformatics analysis to create and annotate the unique, comprehensive coverage of disease and tissue specific transcriptomes. This provides researchers with all the information required to draw meaningful conclusions from their experimental data.

Based upon the gold standard Affymetrix GeneChip® technology, the Cancer DSA™ research tools provide multiple independent measurements for each transcript and content is both reliable and reproducible.

The Breast Cancer DSA™ research tool contains ~60,000 probesets

o 41% transcripts are present in the human RefSeq database

o 51% of transcripts are not present in the human RefSeq database

o 8% of the content represents expressed antisense transcripts to annotated genes

To date, Almac Diagnostic Services has launched Colorectal Cancer DSA™ and Breast Cancer DSA™ and Lung Cancer DSA™. Ovarian Cancer DSA™ and Prostate Cancer DSA™ will be launched in 2008. A pipeline of tests and applications of DSA™ research tools in other disease areas is under development.

About Almac Diagnostic Services

Almac Diagnostic Services is the only global genomic services provider with the capability to deliver fully translational genomics research, from early discovery projects, through to clinical validation and regulatory approval.

Through laboratories in US and Europe, pharma and biotech companies partner with Almac to harness the power of genomics for diagnostic and prognostic development, drug development and patient selection, target identification and companion diagnostics projects.

Customers also utilise Almac’s special expertise in cancer genomics and the extraction of robust and reproducible transcript information from FFPE tissue.

Almac’s leadership in these areas was demonstrated in April 2007 when the company agreed a 510k approach with FDA for the first gene signature multi-variate IVD to be generated from FFPE tissue.

About Almac

The Almac Group comprises five closely integrated divisions offering a broad range of services from R&D, diagnostic/genomic services, API manufacture, formulation development, clinical trial supply and technology (IVRS/EDC), to commercial-scale manufacture. Almac provides services to over 600 companies including all the world leaders in the pharmaceutical and biotech sectors. The company is headquartered in Craigavon, Northern Ireland. US operations are based in Pennsylvania, North Carolina and California.