At the time of incorporation of Intronn LLC into Intronn Inc. in October 2001, the non SMaRT™ assets and intellectual property in the areas of synthetic oligonucleotides and standardisation and quality control markers were transferred into Veri-Q Inc.

Veri-Q concluded a licensing agreement in 2002 with North Carolina State University (NCSU) in respect of the results, data and intellectual property of the research relating to the levels of impurity in synthetic oligonucleotides, and patents have been filed on the antibodies against the protecting/de-protecting groups for applications in antisense therapeutics and oligonucleotide diagnostics. Papers have been published in Analytical Biochemistry and Nature Biotechnology, which revealed that 31% of commercial DNA products from eight different suppliers had impurities because the protecting groups had not been fully removed. This has proved to be costly and unsatisfactory for the users of synthetic oligonucleotides.

A collaboration was set up between Duke University and NCSU in 2003 to address microarrays. Strong progress has been made with data and results confirming that many oligonucleotides used to manufacture microarrays are not fully deprotected and consequently have unreliable hybridization on the “spotted” arrays, leading to inaccurate results and performance. The first EU approval was granted in September 2004 to use a microarray platform for in vitro diagnostics. This should lead to fast track commercialisation.

Veri-Q will out-license the technology for QC applications (quality control) in synthetic oligonucleotide production of RNA, DNA, RNAi, siRNA, and microarray technology for QC in synthetic oligonucleotide production and reagents.

Further product details for Veri-Q can be obtained from Dr Ian Pike, Business Development Director at Proteome Sciences, email: ian.pike@proteomics.com.