The Scientist’s annual Top 10 Innovations competition has again turned up some exciting new products that are poised to revolutionize the work of life scientists. Familiar names, such as Illumina and Leica, win again with updates to their sequencing and imaging technologies, while newcomers like Sciencescape, Organovo, and Edico Genome debut with novel products that caught the eyes of our independent, expert judges.
Judges:
MIRIAM BAYES, asset owner of life sciences products at Thomson Reuters
TARA ROCK, Manager of the Genomics Core Facility at New York University’s Center for Genomics and Systems Biology
ERIC SCHADT, Director of the Icahn Institute for Genomics and Multiscale Biology at New York City’s Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai
KIM KAMDAR, Managing partner at Domain Associates, a health care–focused venture fund
DAVID ECKER, Cofounder of Isis Pharmaceuticals and founder of Ibis Biosciences, now part of Abbott
Nr. 8: HAP1 Knock-Out Cell Lines • Haplogen Genomics
This March, Vienna, Austria–based Haplogen Genomics launched a new human haploid cell line service that uses CRISPR-Cas9 technology to knock out any gene a customer wants, thus expanding the number of specific human haploid knockout cell lines the company can offer. “People were asking us for sets of genes, and we usually had only one of them in the freezer,” explains Tilmann Bürckstümmer, CSO and head of research at Haplogen. “That was really a major shortcoming. People want to study gene families or entire pathways.”
HAP1 cells contain no Y chromosome and two copies of a piece of chromosome 15 and have a fibroblast-like morphology. Haplogen now has more than 800 CRISPR-modified knockout HAP1 lines available that can be shipped within a week for $990 per cell line, and that library continues to grow by about 100 genes per month, says Bürckstümmer. Or, for the same price, customers can get a custom-made line with any gene they want knocked out. It usually takes 8 to 10 weeks to deliver on custom orders.
Haplogen customer Steve Jackson, a molecular biologist at the University of Cambridge in the U.K. and a member of The Scientist’s advisory board, is launching a set of experiments based on Haplogen’s CRISPR-modified cells lacking one of the 90 or so genes for deubiquitinating enzymes (DUBs) that are expected to play a role in DNA repair. “It’s still early days, but I’m just very excited by the kinds of science that I hope my lab will be able to do with these HAP1 knockout cells,” Jackson says.
BAYES: This technology allows a scalable, precise, and efficient generation of knockout cell lines faster and cheaper than previously existing methods.
KAMDAR: A systematic approach to knock out all human genes will ultimately allow for annotation of all human gene functions.
Please find the complete ranking at
www.the-scientist.com
Haplogen Genomics wins a coveted spot in The Scientist's Top 10 Innovations 2014!
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