Qiagen and Geneart are collaborating to develop, produce and commercialize a new product line for the enhanced production of all 35,000 human proteins. QIAgenes is said to be the world's first comprehensive set of plasmids (small extra-chromosomal DNA molecules in bacteria), which serve as carriers ("vectors") for modified ("optimized") synthetic genes mapping the entire human genome.
By using the QIAgenes set of plasmids and optimized genes for synthetic protein production in bacteria, academic and biomedical researchers, as well as biotech and pharmaceutical companies can easily produce large amounts of proteins, which play key roles in addressing diseases such as cancer. This product line enables researchers to facilitate the development of new therapeutics and vaccines and accelerates future drug screening processes.
QIAgenes is available through Qiagen 's web portal GeneGlobe, which already hosts a large database of gene regulation and gene expression assays.
The collaboration between Qiagen and Geneart was initiated through a joint research and development project for which Geneart provided plasmid and gene synthesis technologies and Qiagen supplied automated sample technologies to purify the expressed proteins.
In this first of a series of ongoing collaboration projects, scientists from both companies compared optimized and normal gene sequences of 100 different proteins from the five most common protein classes, thereby generating a highly comprehensive validation study.
The trial showed that QIAgenes solutions achieves very high success rates of more than 90% and yields up to 50 times more protein than conventional methods using "normal" genes by providing optimized synthetic genes and purification methods.
