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Compugen releases breakthrough biotech product TEL AVIV (September 20) - Tel Aviv-based Compugen Ltd. announced
yesterday the commercial availability of its first product for proteomics
research - the Z3 gel analysis system, which revolutionizes the
identification and analysis of complex mixtures of the proteins
that make up human genes.
Proteomics, the study of genes at the protein level, is a more
precise scientific method of identifying drug targets, therapeutic
proteins, and diagnostic markers. This rapidly growing field is
expected to have far-reaching implications for drug development
and discovery.
"Protein mixtures from different tissues need to be separated
to reveal the effects of disease or drugs," said Michal Preminger,
vice president for proteomics business at Compugen. "Once an image
is created in a two-dimensional gel, the location of certain proteins
can be pinpointed, stained, and studied. The resulting analysis
can determine whether a protein is from normal or cancerous tissue,
for example."
The Z3 system employs Compugen's patent-pending proprietary algorithms
to automatically align two images within a few seconds, with greatly
improved accuracy. Analyzed images are then displayed using color
overlay technology that makes the data visually accessible. Furthermore,
Z3 provides research-oriented tools for data mining and querying,
allowing scientists to extract a vast amount of information from
2D gels in general, and large-scale experiments in particular.
The comparison of the protein images has manifold applications,
Preminger explained, including therapeutic drug target discovery
and studying possible toxic side-effects of new drugs being developed
for treatment of cancer.
"Z3 has been in beta test since early this year at a number of
commercial and academic institutions and has been enthusiastically
received," said Ze'ev Smilansky, Compugen's vice president for proteomics.
"The tremendous contribution of Z3 is that what previously had
to be done manually can now be accomplished automatically," added
Preminger.
Brad Walsh of Australian Proteome Analysis said that "after testing
Z3, we believe it is a revolutionary image analysis package with
great potential for bringing a paradigm shift to the way 2D gels
are analyzed."
Helmut Meyer, CEO of Prot@gen, a proteomics company known for its
expertise in 2D gels, said, "Compugen's Z3 image analysis software
takes only 10 minutes to provide complete analysis of proteins,
compared with the up to two days for rival products. Z3 helps take
the bottleneck out of image analysis."
The Z3 software system is now commercially available under various
licensing arrangements, including a pay-per-gel subscription model.
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