A Medical Device Daily

Delphi Medical Systems (Troy, Michigan), a subsidiary of Delphi Corp., reported adding a life science instrumentation manufacturing facility to its operations portfolio. Delphi Medical Systems-Texas Operations, has leased a facility in Stafford, Texas, near Houston, previously utilized by Applied Biosystems (Foster City, California) to manufacture multiple life science instrument platforms. In addition, Delphi Medical Systems-Texas Operations will hire employees from Applied Bio.

This move provides Delphi Medical more business with the Applera (Foster City, California) unit and current Delphi Medical Systems customers and continues its strategy, Delphi Medical said, of customer “diversification within the medical device industry.”

“This creative way of outsourcing on the part of Applied Biosystems enables an uninterrupted product supply to its customer base, avoiding a learning curve normally associated with typical outsourcing initiatives where the manufacturing assets are relocated or duplicated,” said Christophe Sevrain, managing director, Delphi Medical. “Employees already well-trained and experienced in building these extremely complex instruments will remain and continue building the products, thus lowering risks for all involved.”

The Applied Biosystems Group develops and markets instrument-based systems, consumables, software and services for the analysis of nucleic acids (DNA and RNA), small molecules, and proteins.

“In addition to growing our in in vitro diagnostics revenues, one of our targeted market segments, we hope to show other OEMs our interest in outsourcing their manufacturing operations safely and seamlessly, while leveraging Delphi’s strengths in breakthrough technologies and manufacturing operations excellence,” Sevrain said.

GeneGo (St. Joseph, Michigan), a provider of databases, software and services in systems biology, reported receiving a Phase I SBIR grant from the National Institute of General Medical Science for development of methodologies intended for reconstruction of functional networks affected in common human diseases.

In Phase I, GeneGo will generate and test novel algorithms enabling comparison of disease-related “omics“ datasets of different origin, based on networks topology and content.

“Analysis of human biological networks is an exciting new area of systems biology, and we are glad that our efforts are appreciated by the NIH,” said Dr. Tatiana Nikolskaya, chief scientific officer and president of GeneGo. “Common diseases have profound effects on both signaling and metabolic machinery, usually in more than one cell type. Because of this, the result detected by ‘genome scale’ technologies such as microarray gene expression, proteomics and genotyping, is complex and multi-level. Each data type provides only one level of information, and total reconstruction of the ‘big picture’ of molecular pathology is a major challenge.”

Nikolskaya said that the company will study “conditional perturbations of the human interactome assembled from manually curated physical protein interactions and develop algorithms for assembly of complete functional networks, from membrane receptors to transcriptional factors and ‘core effector’ metabolic pathways.”

He added that the approach will be tested in collaboration with the Van Andel Research Institute (Grand Rapids, Michigan).

GeneGo develops systems biology technologies, its computational platform enabling an integration and analysis of different kinds of experimental data and relevant active chemistry within the framework of biological pathways. MetaCore, its first product, assists scientists in the areas of target selection and validation, identification of biomarkers for disease states and toxicology. Its second product, MetaDrug, designed for medicinal chemists, enables the prediction of metabolites and their likely toxicity.