June 6, 2011:

New Service: Testing of DNA contamination through production organisms and cells (residual DNA)

Eurofins Medigenomix is adding a new service to its extensive DNA analysis portfolio: the detection of DNA and RNA in bio-pharmaceutical and biotechnological products.
With the increasing importance of protein based diagnostics and therapeutics residual DNA testing is gaining more and more weight.
The reasons are the strict requirements of the regulatory authorities in the area DNA contamination in final products as well as the control and optimisation of production processes.
Additionally with the growing production of engineered food, chemicals and food additives (e.g. vitamins, amino acids), there is a need for sensitive, high quality analytics by a well experienced laboratory. Therefore testing for residual DNA is an important addition to the service portfolio of Eurofins Medigenomix. The laboratory has gained a high reputation as one of leading providers for DNA trace analysis in forensics and DNA services for the pharmaceutical industry (pharmacogenetics and -genomics) in Europe such as:

• assay development and DNA/RNA analytics for viruses
• testing of DNA/ RNA traces in medical products
• detection of DNA/ RNA of all groups of organisms from a wide range of sample material.

For more information see Business Unit 'DNA Forensics / Applied DNA Testing" >> and Business Unit 'Pharma Services' >>, respectively.

February 28, 2011:

New Screening Service for preclinical research: the OncoCarta™ Panel

Eurofins Medigenomix GmbH extended their broad pharma services portfolio by addition of the OncoCarta™ Panel* from Sequenom Inc., San Diego, CA. Using the OncoCarta™ Panel a comprehensive somatic mutation profiling is possible.
In addition to the characterisation of cell lines, the OncoCarta™ Panel can also be used for screening of clinical relevant mutations in tumor samples in the scope of drug development. With the panel it is possible to analyse up to 238 relevant mutations in 19 oncogenes, e.g. in EGFR, KRAS or BRAF.
As starting material for example fresh, frozen or formalin-fixed paraffin-embedded (FFPE) tumor tissue can be used.
Analyses with the OncoCarta™ Panels are carried out on the MALDI-TOF mass spectrometry platform MassARRAY^® from Sequenom.

The main advantages of these panels are:

• Extreme sensitivity: Mutations occurring at down to 10% frequency can be detected and are reliably quantified
• DNA from FFPE samples can be used as starting material
• Only 500 ng of genomic DNA are required per analysis.
  

* _{for research use only}