Sponsored Insight
L1000™ Expression Profiling is a revolutionary high-throughput gene-expression profiling method that produces full-genome expression profiles direct from cells at a rate of thousands a day and at only a fraction of the cost of conventional methods.
Available exclusively from Genometry, Inc. from dedicated facilities in Kendall Square, Cambridge, MA, L1000 works by measuring the expression of one thousand specially-selected 'landmark' genes, then calculating the levels of the remaining transcripts using an algorithm trained on tens-of-thousands of historical gene-expression profiles.
One of the transformative applications uniquely enabled by Genometry’s L1000™ Expression Profiling services is what has become known as “library-scale gene-expression profiling” or “library digitization.” This strategy relies on L1000 to create standardized, high-dimensional functional fingerprints of entire small-molecule libraries of hundreds of thousands — maybe even millions — of compounds.
An early adopter of this method was Janssen, who has been working with Genometry since 2015 to make L1000 profiles of 250,000 compounds from its primary screening collection. A number of other large pharmaceutical companies have since followed suit.
A principal reason to make L1000 data from a chemical library is to assess its functional diversity, identifying blind-spots to be back-filled and allowing de-duplication where redundancies are found, as well as providing a rational basis for functional sub-setting of the collection. However, the killer app has proven to be signature screening — the process of identifying potent and selective chemical matter by searching for compounds affecting a set of genes of therapeutic interest (but not others) by mining L1000 profiles stored in a database. This approach avoids entirely the time and expense of developing a corresponding disease or target-specific assay, and performing a physical primary screen.
Things get really interesting though when companies share the L1000 data from their proprietary compounds with each other, as well as with external disease biologists. This sharing process is just starting to take hold as the number of companies and the number of compounds profiled reaches critical mass. Genometry is at the nexus of these efforts, providing the infrastructure to facilitate the mining of the data while also protecting the intellectual property of the respective parties. And the trend seems set to continue as the benefits of finding new uses for existing chemical assets, and the partners to help prosecute those projects, become increasingly important within the pharma-discovery enterprise.
To learn more about Genometry’s L1000™ Expression Profiling services, click here.