Orchid Completes First Major Milestone for AstraZeneca
PRINCETON, N.J., Jun 29, 2001 /PRNewswire via COMTEX/ -- Orchid BioSciences,
Inc. (Nasdaq: ORCH) today announced that it has successfully completed the first
milestone in its multi-year genotyping and pharmacogenetics collaboration with
AstraZeneca, resulting in a significant payment to Orchid. Further financial
details were not disclosed.
Using the SNPcode(TM) technology that combines Orchid's proprietary SNP-IT(TM)
biochemistries with the GenFlex(TM) chip and GeneChip(R) system of Affymetrix,
Orchid rapidly developed assays and conducted genotyping for the first cohort of
samples provided by AstraZeneca. In a significant concordance study to validate
the overall accuracy and reproducibility of the technology, Orchid has also
exceeded all of the targets established for the first phase of the program.
Based on these positive results, Orchid and AstraZeneca are now proceeding to
the next phase of the collaboration.
"We are very pleased to have rapidly reached the first delivery milestone in our
collaboration with AstraZeneca," said Jack T. Ball, Jr., senior vice president
and general manager of Orchid's Life Sciences Group. "We are achieving
outstanding accuracy and throughput on the high throughput SNPcode platform that
we recently added to our MegaSNPatron(TM) genotyping facility, and these results
are further confirmation of the exceptional performance of this system."
The SNPcode system is particularly well suited for analyzing large numbers of
SNPs for whole chromosome and genome wide mapping studies
