Zyomyx Inc announced that GlaxoSmithKline (GSK) has become an early technology access customer for its Protein Profiling Biochip System, human cytokine biochips and subsequent protein biochips.

"We're delighted to have GSK select our system," said Lawrence Cohen, Zyomyx president and chief executive officer. "We believe that the Zyomyx Protein Profiling Biochip System will play a crucial role in drug discovery and pre-clinical research."

The Protein Profiling Biochip System and human cytokine biochips enable researchers to profile the expression of 30 cytokines in human serum samples simultaneously, improving the speed and sensitivity of these studies. It vastly improves researchers' ability to elucidate the critical components involved in inflammation and immune disorders. The applications for the technology extend throughout the drug discovery and development process, including validation of therapeutic targets and biomarkers, selection of drug candidates and evaluation of effects of drugs in pre-clinical and clinical studies.

Current understanding of the genome and the fact that drugs normally target proteins that genes encode, not the genes themselves, has spawned a new science called "proteomics" - the large-scale study of the vast, still undetermined number of proteins in the human body and their constantly changing form and function. Until recently, the productivity of research was limited by tools that could examine a small fraction of the proteins present in a sample at one time. Zyomyx' multiplexed, high-throughput system lifts the constraints on protein analysis, allowing scientists to engage in more productive and cost-effective protein research.