Agilent Technologies and ExonHit Expand Agreement for Agilent to Market and Sell ExonHit SpliceArrays Worldwide
PALO ALTO, Calif. & PARIS–Agilent Technologies Inc. (NYSE:A) and ExonHit Therapeutics (Euronext:ALEHT) announced that they have entered into a marketing alliance in which Agilent will market and sell nine different ExonHit human and mouse SpliceArrays as commercial products. These SpliceArrays include GPCR, Ion Channel, nuclear receptors and apoptosis pathways. SpliceArrays are a new generation of microarrays that resolve the expression of genes at the level of their alternatively spliced transcripts. Recent publications suggest that more than 80 percent of all human genes undergo alternative splicing, a process by which a single gene can produce several distinct proteins. Scientists increasingly recognize the importance of alternative splicing and the need for robust and accurate tools to fully interrogate the complete transcriptome to understand disease states. ExonHit’s proprietary SpliceArray content and patented probe configuration achieve this goal. ExonHit SpliceArrays originally became available through Agilent in August 2005, and based on the success of that collaboration, the two companies expanded the agreement.