Hitachi Chemical Co., Ltd. (Head Office: Tokyo; President and CEO: Kazuyuki Tanaka; Capital: 15.5 billion yen; hereinafter referred to as “Hitachi Chemical”), in the field of life sciences, developed a novel mRNA quantitative assay called “Hem(A)+ System”(*1). This is a simple, high-throughput, reproducible method, that offers a wide range of applications in clinical biomarker discovery and molecular testing to target personalized medicine(*2).

In today’s aging society, maintaining good health and improving quality of life while reducing healthcare costs is a key challenge. We are facing the growing need for medical treatments with high efficacy and minimum adverse effects. As a result, “personalized medicine” is receiving significant attention as an approach to meet such needs.

By targeting personalized medicine, Hitachi Chemical developed the “Hem(A)+ System,” to address this need for improved medical treatments. This system can extract and quantify leukocyte-derived mRNA from a very small amount of whole blood (0.05 mL). It employs simple filtration to capture leukocyte prior to extraction and purification of mRNA. This eliminates interference by a large amount of red blood cells in whole blood, and enables sensitive detection of the changes in mRNA levels. Also, the system adopts a 96-well microplate format, making it suitable for simultaneous processing of multiple samples. The best feature of this system is that it simulates the drug response of an individual in a test tube by using whole blood samples stimulated with the drug. This system successfully brought a new “ex vivo” concept, which measures in vivo response in an in vitro assay, to practice and makes it possible to predict drug efficacy.

With this system, Hitachi Chemical plans to conduct contract test services for pharmaceutical companies to find novel biomarkers and select subjects for clinical trials by predicting drug efficacy, and eventually aims to have this system as a companion diagnostic(*3).

We are actively conducting collaborative research in a wide range of clinical fields in Japan and the US. We had poster presentations at the SITC 27th Annual Meeting(*4) held in the late October, on predictive markers for the efficacy of a breast cancer drug and dendritic cell vaccine therapy for cancers(*5). We will also have a poster presentation at the 2012 ASH Annual Meeting and Exposition(*6) scheduled in early December about the predictive markers of effect of a multiple myeloma drug and adverse effect.

About Hitachi Chemical:

Hitachi Chemical is a chemical manufacturing company headquartered in Tokyo. The company has 16,713 employees, a sales volume of 473.1 billion yen (fiscal 2011, consolidated), with many products holding top market share. Its products are aimed at a wide range of materials and parts, including functional materials and high-tech parts/system segments. The company is also focusing its efforts on “life sciences” as one of four core business areas, selling products such as OPTIGEN Systems for allergy diagnosis and Hitachi Clinical Analyzers for clinical chemistry testing.