SEATTLE, March 20 — Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center (FHCRC) and NSB POSTECH, Inc. (NSB) have reached a collaboration agreement to coordinate their efforts and to determine the efficacy of the NSB’s NanoCones surface technology in creating high quality proteomic microarrays to be used in the study of human diseases. NSB is a South Korean biotech company which possesses a proprietary microarray technology and a great deal of expertise in nano-scale controlled surface chemistry. NSB has agreed to fund the collaboration. Announced today, this collaboration will involve a comparison of slides created with NSB’s newly developed NanoCones surface technology and the current industry standard. “This is the first time a Korean biotech company has had an opportunity to collaborate with a major U.S.-based cancer research center. We are very thrilled to be working with scientists at the Hutchinson Center,” said Dr. Joon Won Park, president of NSB and one of the inventors of the NanoCones technology. “We are excited about the preliminary data that has been generated when antibodies were arrayed using the NanoCones technology. We hope this will make our antibody arrays more sensitive and accurate,” said Dr. Paul Lampe, member of the Hutchinson Center’s Public Health Sciences Division and associate program head of molecular diagnostics. Antibody or protein microarrays are glass microscope slides onto which very small amounts of thousands of different antibodies or proteins have been affixed at distinct locations. Antibody microarrays can be used to simultaneously determine the level of each antibody’s specific binding partner in complex mixtures such as blood so thousands of different assays can be performed with small amounts of sample. At Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center, interdisciplinary teams of world-renowned scientists and humanitarians work together to prevent, diagnose and treat cancer, HIV/AIDS and other diseases. Hutchinson Center researchers, including three Nobel laureates, bring a relentless pursuit and passion for health, knowledge and hope to their work and to the world. For more information, visit http://www.fhcrc.org. NSB POSTECH, Inc. is a South Korea based Biotech Company specializing in nano-surface technology for genomic and proteomic microarrays. NSB’s mission is to detect and prevent disease. NanoCones technology research was funded with support from POSCO, Korea’s world-renowned steel manufacturer and POSTECH, one of Asia’s leading Science and Technology Universities. For more information, visit http://www.nsbpostech.com.