Bioline, the PCR company, a wholly-owned subsidiary of Meridian Bioscience, Inc., has launched the Epik miRNA Panel Assays, developed for miRNA profiling of cancer samples, biofluids, and stem cells. The Epik miRNA Panel Assays are the result of a collaboration between MiRXES in Singapore and Bioline.

MiRXES is a spin-off from the Bioprocessing Technology Institute of the Agency of Science Technology and Research (A*STAR) and is supported by Exploit Technologies.

Using a novel approach developed by MiRXES, combinations of miRNA specific reverse transcriptase and hemi-nested real-time PCR primers have been designed to maximise miRNA detection sensitivity and specificity. The real-time PCR assays use SensiSMART with SYBR Green to enable detection of extremely low levels of miRNA with high specificity, allowing the discrimination between closely related miRNA sequences. This highly reproducible, sensitive platform has been validated independently by molecular diagnostic and pharmaceutical laboratories and showed superior performance to existing commercial assays. The Epik miRNA Panel Assays provide researchers with a convenient way to quickly analyse miRNAs that suggest a correlation with the dysregulations in various cancers, in maintenance, differentiation and reprogramming of stem cells and to look at circulating miRNAs that are regarded as a promising new class of biomarkers.

Marco Calzavara, president of Bioline commented, “The release of the Epik miRNA Panel Assays follows the release of the ISOLATE II miRNA, Plant miRNA, Biofluids RNA, RNA/DNA/Protein and FFPE RNA/DNA Kits earlier this year and shows the continued commitment of Bioline to produce high quality miRNA kits to help researchers with miRNA expression profiling and quantification and in biomarker discovery.”

Richard L. Eberly, president of Meridian Life Science, Inc., stated, “We are excited about the release of the Epik miRNA Panel Assays and the enhanced performance they provide for our important life science customers in the research, molecular diagnostic and pharmaceutical laboratories and biotechnology companies. We remain committed to the continued expansion of the rapidly growing portfolio of highly specialized molecular biology products from Bioline.”