Companies will also optimize Biocrates’ kits on Chenomx’ instrumentation.

Biocrates Life Sciences and Chenomx entered a co-marketing agreement through which they will offer and promote each other’s complementary metabolomics services. The firms will also work together to evaluate and optimize Biocrates’ metabolomics kits on Chenomx’ instrumentation and software.

Biocrates and Chenomx are both focused on the identification and quantification of endogenous metabolites in body fluid or tissue samples for use as biomarkers or in biomarker panels. Biocrates’ technology is based on mass spectrometry (MS), while Chenomx’ utilises NMR spectroscopy.

With MS offering high sensitivity and NMR providing broad metabolite coverage, “the two methods produce complementary data sets with very little overlap in results,” comments Neil Taylor, Chenomx CEO. “Both tests can be run on the same samples thus offering a more comprehensive profile.”

Biocrates reports that its mass spec-based approach has advantages over metabolic profiling, like the ability to quantify metabolites and the suitability of the method to high-throughput applications. Biocrates’ platform is being commercialized for the identification and validation of biomarker panels that help identify disease risk, diagnose diseases, assess disease severity, and guide treatment. A pipeline of metabolomic biomarkers is in development for diagnostic applications in diabetes, kidney disease, sepsis, stroke, and cancer.

The firm is, in parallel, working with partners to develop biomarker panels that can help evaluate drug activity and identify patients most likely to respond to a treatment or those who at an increased risk of suffering drug-related side effects.
Biocrates has also developed the AbsoluteIDQ p150 Kit for research applications. This mass spectrometry-based metabolomics kit is designed to identify and quantify over 160 metabolites from four compound classes: amino acids, acyl carnitines, glycerophospholipids and sphingolipids,  as well as hexose. The firm says the kit allows metabolites from plasma samples to be measured in just a few minutes per sample and can use sample volumes as low as 10 µL.

Chenomx offers licensing and contract services based on its Chenomx NMR Suite  technology for generating, classifying, and interpreting metabolic information obtained from complex biological fluids. The flagship NMR-based platform has been designed to allow researchers to correlate metabolic responses with pathology, toxicity, drug efficacy, and genetics. The latest version, Chenomx NMR Suite 6.1, was launched in February 2010.

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