Fran Dinuzzo, VP of Integrated Biology Solutions, Agilent Technologies

What was the thinking behind Agilent's decision to form the Integrated Biology Solutions division?

First, we took a look out into the market place at our customers, scientists and researchers who are really helping to develop the future of life sciences research. Clearly the differentiation between people looking at genomics and nucleic acids and those who are studying proteomics and proteins is starting to fade. More and more customers are trying to understand the relationship between, for example, a gene expression pattern and what happens within the cell from a proteome perspective. More customers have been asking us to relate information together to help them develop assays that look across both the nucleic acid side of the cell as well as the protein. That, together with our own internal understanding of technology and the bridging that has started to occur between the technologies, led us to the point where clearly it was a natural time to pull together the various aspects of our life science business into a single unit. In the new division, we can focus not only on world-class technologies for studying genes and proteins, but also ensure that we are frequently bridging technologies through assay and informatics development.

How has the gene expression business developed over the past year, and what are the prospects you see going forward in 2004?

I think if you look back at our gene expression business, clearly the technology we have is a phenomenal platform technology. The 60mer oligos that we can print down on arrays base-by-base give us not only the highest sensitivity in the market place, but the greatest flexibility in terms of time-to-customized-configuration of an array that meets a customer's needs. So over the last year, what we have done is to continue to develop that technology, expanding the platform in terms of the different formats that the arrays are available in, such as the double-density 44K probe format of the whole genome arrays, as well as to expand for specific applications outside genome screening and for the plant science world. We are continuing to move that forward, enhancing our capabilities and working very closely with customers to take this platform and move it into their environment.

Recently we have begun to introduce what we call the 8X format, which is 8 smaller arrays collected on a single 1 x 3 piece of glass. Through our open platform, the 8X format now allows customers to very specifically define a smaller set of probes that they want to be able to look at. For example, consider a higher throughput environment such as toxicogenomics where you are not trying to do a scan, but are looking at the expression of a specific set of genes across many samples. With 8-pack, you can put 8 samples onto one microarray, which provides a huge time and financial savings.

Could you sum up for us Agilent's strategy towards proteomics?

I think if you look at proteomics and compare proteomics to the world of nucleic acids, the technology is certainly at a much earlier state in development. Among the researchers in the world trying to understand the proteome, trying to understand how to develop assays to investigate the proteome, what we doing inside Agilent is really a 2-fold approach towards it.

The first obviously, is utilizing our strength in liquid chromatography and mass spectrometry to be able to help customers be able to evaluate proteins of interest. Secondarily we are working on the assay side of proteomics. Our Multiple Affinity Removal Column is very well received in the plasma proteome world. Leaders from HUPO are identifying it as a key breakthrough technology. There what we are trying to do is to allow the researchers who are trying to get in and investigate the proteome, to get down to the very low abundant proteins, the places where biomarkers and real proteins of interest are trying to occur. As we move forward you will see us starting to look at applications beyond protein identification, looking at protein expression, post-translational modifications, and protein-protein interactions. With all of these technologies, we will continue to peel back the onion and try to detect how the smallest elements of the proteome affect the health or condition of a specific cell.

What is your main marketing strategy for the rest of the year in these new product areas?

The formation of IBS will not trigger a dramatic change in our direction for the remainder of the year from a main marketing perspective, though we will probably see some modifications. Our goals are 2-fold. As I said earlier, we are focused on having best in class technologies for each of our platforms. Having best in class technologies is the first step to assembling those together in a way that facilitates the unique and advanced research that our customer scientists are trying to do. So for us to drive for best in class puts us in the best position to work with those scientists. We will continue to participate in scientific forums to talk about the science and the technology we have to apply to that science, making sure that we stay connected with the early stage developers. Secondly we will continue to expand our application and workflow solutions, looking more closely at the market place and key applications, and helping customers understand how to pull together the various platforms we provide, often times in partnerships with others to be able to address specific applications.

Agilent has recently Acquired Silicon Genetics. How will this acquisition enhance Agilient's product portfolio?

Data management is still a key bottleneck in many life science research areas. To address this issue we are increasing our investments in informatics with the aim of providing solutions spanning applications in gene expression, genotyping and protein identification. The Acquisition of Silicon Genetics provides us with an outstanding informatics product portfolio along with a strong team of people with extensive experience in software development, marketing, sales and support.

Silicon Genetics employs around 50 People most of which we expect to join Agilent. The combined staff will form a life science informatics team that will be an incubator for informatics products for DNA, RNA, protein and pathway applications. This team will further develop the existing products of both Silicon Genetics and our own with the goal of providing customers with functionality in new research areas to enhance their productivity, creativity and research success.

We see informatics as a key to advancing integrated biological research with this in mind we have also recently increased our commitment to the continued development and enhancement of the Rosetta platforms. We are the exclusive distributor of Rosetta Biosoftware’s Resolver and Luminator gene-expression data analysis systems. We plan to provide these and other informatics products both individually and as integrated solutions to address existing and emerging life science applications. Together with Rosetta we will continue to provide improvements in gene expression analysis. Integrated software is critical to the advancement of integrated biology. We are hoping that increasing our investments in life science informatics will facilitate larger advances in integrated biology.

Further Information: http://www.agilent.com/about/index.html