IVGN: Gulf Coast Consortium Members to Use Invitrogen's Stealth siRNA Libraries in Screening Centers

Invitrogen Corporation (Nasdaq:IVGN), a provider of essential life science technologies for disease research and drug discovery, today announced it has formed a strategic scientific relationship with researchers from Baylor College of Medicine and The University of Texas at Houston, part of the John S. Dunn Gulf Coast Consortium for Chemical Genomics (GCC-CG).

As part of the relationship, consortium members plan to use Invitrogen's broad gene expression and imaging portfolio to enable discovery of biomedically relevant aspects of gene and protein expression through advanced screening techniques. The screening centers will focus on many aspects of disease-related biology including diabetes, cancer and steroid hormone-related metabolic disorders.

Peter Davies, M.D., executive vice president of research at University of Texas Health Science Center, and director of GCC-CG, stated, "Invitrogen's siRNA screening technologies and their high content, high throughput assays will greatly assist us in a variety of research being conducted by GCC-CG researchers," a view echoed by Kathleen Matthews, chair of the Gulf Coast Consortia Oversight Committee.

Scientists at core facilities at Baylor College of Medicine and University of Texas Health Science Center will use their expertise in high content, high throughput image-based screening and quantitative gene expression, respectively, to maximize the biological content from these experiments. Initial experiments will use Invitrogen's human kinase, human nuclear receptor, and mouse nuclear receptor collections. The quantitative effects of the siRNA molecules on gene and protein expression will be assessed using Invitrogen's novel, highly sensitive SYBR GreenER(TM) real time qPCR technology, and image-based tools from its Molecular Probes(TM) portfolio.

"Invitrogen is committed to driving gene expression analysis techniques forward," said Amy Butler, Ph.D., vice president, gene expression profiling, at Invitrogen. "This broad collaboration with renowned research centers allows us to jointly make important contributions to new medical and drug development research."

Additional participating members of the GCC-CG are Rice University, University of Houston, The University of Texas M. D. Anderson Cancer Center, and The University of Texas Medical Branch at Galveston. Together the six institutions form a larger organization, the Gulf Coast Consortia.

"This partnership allows us to work with many key decision makers in the academic marketplace," said Lewis Vann, Ph.D, business development manager for Invitrogen's Consortium Program. "By combining resources and technologies we are maximizing the impact on consortium-based research."

"Access to Invitrogen's siRNA library and hardware/software resources for screens that reach down to the individual investigator laboratory is very efficient," said Michael A. Mancini, Ph.D., associate professor in the Department of Molecular and Cellular Biology at Baylor College of Medicine, and co-director of the GCC-CG.

About GCC
The Gulf Coast Consortia (GCC) brings together the strengths of its six member institutions to build interdisciplinary collaborative research teams and training programs in the biological sciences at their intersection with the computational, chemical, mathematical, and physical sciences. Comprised of six prominent and geographically proximate Gulf Coast institutions, Baylor College of Medicine, Rice University, University of Houston, University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston, University of Texas Medical Branch at Galveston and University of Texas M. D. Anderson Cancer Center, the GCC's goal is to provide a cutting edge collaborative training environment and research infrastructure, one beyond the capability of any single institution. The GCC's mission is to train the next generation of bioscientists and to enable scientists to ask and answer questions that cross scientific disciplines to address the challenging biological issues of our time and, ultimately, to apply the resulting expertise and knowledge to the treatment and prevention of disease.