Roche ‘wheeled labs’ begin national tour

Roche Diagnostics (Indianapolis) recently launched two customized “lab on wheels” semi-tractor trailers as mobile demonstration centers, called the Roche Explorers. They began their cross-country trek recently, first stopping in Atlanta, setting in motion a 100+ city nationwide tour.

The Explorers will showcase solutions for laboratory testing to educate current and potential customers about the products Roche Diagnostics offer, the company said. They give lab personnel the opportunity to see and understand how new technology can help improve efficiency in their hospital labs and in turn can help their physicians deliver improved patient care.

Andy Thomson, senior VP, Roche Centralized Diagnostics, said. “We now have the ability to reach a wider base of lab personnel that might not be familiar with our products and technologies.”

Roche (Basel, Switzerland) is a leader in diagnostics, its Diagnostics Division posting annual sales of 8.7 billion Swiss francs.

F&S: new electrophesis expands market

While protein electrophoresis is a well-established method in the field of protein expression analysis, the development of new techniques extending the principles of this technology has renewed interest in this experimental methodology.

New analysis from Frost & Sullivan (F&S; Palo Alto, California), “U.S. Protein Electrophoresis Markets,” reveals that the market earned revenues of $179.2 million in 2006 and estimates this to reach $235.6 million in 2013.

Protein electrophoresis is an efficient and relatively inexpensive method of analyzing the expression of proteins from biological samples, according to F&S.

Protein electrophoresis applications have created significant opportunities for market participants providing tools and products to life science researchers.

The ubiquitous application of protein electrophoresis in research laboratories has driven market participants, both established and new, to focus on consistently improving the quality of tools provided to researchers. The migration to increase throughput technologies has also spurred the industry to develop higher throughput gel apparatus and automated imaging products that remove much of the labor and time required for analysis.

Although 2-D protein electrophoresis approaches may appear as simple extensions of 1-D techniques, the 2-D method is capable of providing information about global proteomic expression not available through many other methods, according to F&S. The separation of proteins along a second dimension provides greater resolution of cellular content, thereby aiding in the identification of proteins that may be identified as a biomarker that signals the presence of a diseased state. Additionally, the development of new non-chemiluminescent imaging modalities has not only helped drastically reduce the costs of 1-D experiments, but also provided high-throughput capabilities that researchers can use to study a greater number of targets.