How is Agilent approaching protein microarrays?
Agilent has developed two different types of technologies for making DNA microarrays. One is a deposition system that deposits material made offline through inkjet heads onto glass substrates. The other is in situ synthesized oligonucleotide arrays. The DNA microarrays that Agilent sells now are exclusively made by in situ synthesis. There is a project here that uses the deposition technology to make protein arrays. We are exploring from the research side, basically how well protein arrays can work, and, importantly, what type of biological questions they may be useful for, and to get a sense of what the market would look like. The prototype protein array [created in conjunction with the Quertermous group] is an antibody array to look at serum samples to see whether there might be protein profiles in the serum that correlate with a propensity for heart disease. Part of the antibody collection that ended up on the chip was developed by looking at some of the expression profiling studies
