RayBiotech Renews Biomarker Discovery Grant Program for 2011

Dec. 2, 2010 - PRLog -- RayBiotech, Inc., the Protein Array Pioneer Company, announced today it will renew its Biomarker Discovery Pilot Grant program for 2011. RayBiotech will accept applications for pilot grants beginning in early 2011. Winning applicants will be eligible for restricted grants of $5,000 to $20,000 worth of RayBiotech products and/or services for biomarker research.

Successful biomarker discovery and validation is paramount to improving disease diagnostics, prognostics, screening and personalized medicine. However, traditional approaches to biomarker discovery using techniques of mass spectrometry and 2D gel electrophoresis can be time consuming and expensive. Moreover, many of the important cell–cell signaling proteins that play a critical role in many disease processes, such as inflammatory markers, chemokines, growth factors and angiogenic factors, are present in biological samples at concentrations too low to be detected by these analytical methods.
In contrast to the use of traditional methods of proteomics, biomarker screening using antibody array technology is much less expensive, easy to use and requires no more sophisticated equipment than that required for Western Blotting or gene microarray analysis.

The application of antibody arrays to biomarker discovery was illustrated in a seminal article in Nature Medicine (Ray, et al., November 2007), in which researchers analyzed 259 blood samples, comparing those from individuals with presymptomatic to late-stage Alzheimer's disease with those from individuals without the disease. Among 120 plasma markers measured using RayBiotech’s arrays, a panel of 18 proteins exhibited an expression pattern that was statistically different in the Alzheimer's samples versus other samples.  This panel of 18 biomarkers was used to predict the presence of the disease in a test sample set with nearly 90 percent accuracy.

“Last year’s program was so successful that we had to renew it,” says Dr. Ray Huang, Founder and President of RayBiotech, Inc. “Antibody array technologies are a not just a viable alternative to traditional methods of biomarker discovery; using antibody-based techniques, biomarker research is accessible to most researchers with even a modest budget.”

For more information on RayBiotech’s Biomarker Discovery Pilot Grant Program, please visit their Website at http://www.RayBiotech.com/Grant

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ABOUT RAYBIOTECH
RayBiotech, Inc., introduced the first commercially available cytokine antibody array in 2001. Since then, RayBiotech array products have been featured in hundreds of publications, including top-tier journals, such as Nature, Nature Medicine, Cell, Lancet, PNAS (USA) and many others. Offering more antibody array choices than any of its competitors, RayBiotech continues to lead in the development of protein array technologies. A spin-off from Emory University’s School of Medicine, RayBiotech is privately owned, with headquarters in metropolitan Atlanta (Norcross, GA).