The National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute (NHLBI) has chosen NuGEN Technologies to provide automated reagent solutions for expression profiling of about 6,000 blood samples from the Framingham Heart Study.
NuGEN Technologies is the provider of RNA and DNA amplification and sample preparation technologies for genomic analysis.
Initiated in 1948, the Framingham Heart Study is an epidemiological study, with an enrollment of more than 15,000 individuals spanning three generations.
The NHLBI has recently entered into a new research project, the Systems Approach to Biomarker Research in Cardiovascular Disease Initiative (SABRe CVD Initiative).
NHLBI’s project-3 of the SABRe CVD program to measure Gene Expression analysis is expected to deploy the genomic technologies to enable exploration on the same valuable collection of samples to further dissect the genetic risk factors associated with various diseases.
NuGEN said that its automated sample preparation solutions, including the Ovation Pico WTA System and Encore Biotin Module, will allow researchers to examine critical molecular markers in the microarray-based expression profiling portion of the SABRe CVD Initiative.
NuGEN CEO Elizabeth Hutt said that they were proud that their solutions would facilitate the association of genetic risk factors to the development of heart disease and other health conditions.
NuGEN Research and Development vice president Doug Amorese said that the genetic information from the well-characterised samples collected by the Framingham Heart Study has the potential to impact human health and their understanding of cardiovascular disease.
“With NuGEN’s sample preparation solutions, researchers can now explore samples in large repositories with confidence and further develop associations between disease states and genomic markers,” Amorese said.