Nanogen and Prodesse to Develop Infectious Disease Diagnostics

Nanogen, Inc. and Prodesse, Inc. have announced the signing of a collaboration agreement to develop automated, highly sensitive microarray-based products to detect a number of infectious disease agents, including influenza, pneumonia, adenovirus, herpes, West Nile Virus, and SARS. The companies will integrate Prodesse's proprietary multiplex amplification technology with the automated NanoChip® platform and jointly develop and market gene-based testing products to health care providers and clinical reference labs. Financial terms of the agreement and product availability dates were not disclosed.

By combining Prodesse's pathogen detecting products with the NanoChip® Molecular Biology Workstation, Nanogen and Prodesse expect to offer reagents for the development of an automated process for testing patient samples within hours, enabling physicians to obtain results and prescribe therapeutics in response to test results. This should help reduce inappropriate treatment with antibiotics, the overuse of which has resulted in an increase in antibiotic-resistant strains of bacteria and a decrease in the effectiveness of many commonly prescribed antibiotics.

"Our collaboration with Prodesse facilitates Nanogen's entry into the large infectious disease marketplace and expands the capabilities of our molecular testing platform," said Bruce Huebner, president and chief operating officer of Nanogen, Inc. "Testing for infectious diseases on Nanogen workstations will become a cornerstone in our Platformation™ strategy of offering clinical reference labs a variety of analyte specific reagents and tests that can be performed on one versatile system."

"We believe the combination of Prodesse's front-end multiplex amplification technology and Nanogen's back-end rapid detection system is an ideal marriage of two technologies that will greatly improve the ability for health care providers and labs to detect infectious disease agents," said Tom Shannon, chief executive officer of Prodesse, Inc.

Prodesse currently offers six different multiplex products that can be used by laboratories to detect a total of 28 different pathogens, and it expects to release five more products with an additional 19 targets. The Company's technology amplifies the sequences for many different pathogens simultaneously with virtually no loss of sensitivity or specificity, and with no cross- reactivity, which is important for obtaining precise test results. Nanogen's open-architecture NanoChip® System allows detection of known, amplified sequences in a highly accurate and automated fashion, offering users increased speed, versatility and cost effectiveness over conventional detection methods.