One of Europe’s most respected proteomics experts commits to new system

Sydney, Australia: Gelcompany has made the first sale of its new High Performance Electrophoresis (HPE) FlatTop Tower system into Switzerland.

The buyer is Professor Denis Hochstrasser, Vice-Dean of the Faculty of Medicine, Chairman of the Department of Genetics and Laboratory Medicine, and Director of the Laboratory Medicine Service at Geneva University and University Hospital, Geneva, Switzerland. Professor Hochstrasser is one of the world’s leading proteomics scientists and also on the board of the Human Proteome Organisation Council (HUPO).

Professor Hochstrasser said, “I have been waiting 20 years for an electrophoresis system like this. Never have I seen a system that is so reproducible, robust and easy to use. The results are outstanding and will offer new opportunities for the use of 2D electrophoresis.”

Gelcompany CEO James Walker believes the HPE system’s Swiss debut with Professor Hochstrasser will help tip more sales. “This endorsement from Professor Hochstrasser is an enormous boost in marketing the product to other proteomics service providers.”

For Gelcompany CMO Guenter Thesseling the acceptance of the new HPE system by Professor Hochstrasser and his team will open the doors to many other proteomics labs world-wide. “This is a very encouraging confirmation of our technology and will advance proteomics research.”

The HPE system was launched late last year and its ground-breaking technology enables higher resolution, reproducibility and ease-of-use in 1D and 2D gel electrophoresis separations.

In 2D electrophoresis the breakthrough HPE technology can detect up to 15 per cent more proteins spots because it uses thinner pre-cast gels and a more efficient cooling system with higher electric field strength. This results in running times of around four hours and produces greater resolution and sharper bands or spots.

The new HPE system uses 1D and 2D pre-cast gels in an easy-to-use FlatTop Tower with four horizontal electrophoresis platforms in one system.

The quality-controlled, pre-casted HPE gels on plastic backing are laid onto the cooling plates – doing away with the time-consuming vertical electrophoresis preparation of glass gel cassettes.

There is no need for technicians to handle tanks containing up to 25 litres of buffer fluid, or for time-consuming cleaning for re-use. And of course there is no need to handle toxic monomer acrylamide for gel casting any more.

The HPE gels have a one year shelf-life and remain stable during storage. The equilibration buffer is also provided – meaning fewer variables than conventional electrophoresis.

About Professor Hochstrasser

Prof Hochstrasser studied both physics and medicine in Geneva. He was a visiting medical student at Duke University and did an internship at University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in internal medicine. He returned to Geneva as chief resident in internal medicine.

In 1983 his strong interest was to work on protein separation and using computers to analyse the data. He began work on 2-D gels as a protein separation technique. He then worked on imaging using computers to analyze the 2-D gel images. Based on his results he was invited to the US National Institutes of Health as a guest researcher where he worked for over a year.

He returned to Geneva to do medical computing for five years. His desire was to be in the laboratory so from 1988 to 1993 he was head of medical imaging while still practicing as an internist. During that time he and his team started to develop software for image analysis of 2-D gels, and of CT scans. This included building the protein database UniProt and web server, ExPASy, the first ever web server for life sciences. This was ultimately supported by Geneva University, the Swiss government and the NIH. The team then founded the Swiss Institute of Bioinformatics (SIB) and a biotech software company Genebio SA. At the same time the team built the biomedical proteomic research group to analyze clinical samples, discover biomarkers and do fundamental research. It also founded GeneProt Inc in Delaware and Geneva that analyzed plasma proteome in depth.