Technological and scientific initiatives from Helicos BioSciences Corporation

Sep 23 2009

Helicos BioSciences Corporation (NASDAQ: HLCS) provided updates on recent scientific findings and progress on Helicos’s technology initiatives.

Speaking at the Personal Genomes conference in Cold Spring Harbor, NY, and the CHI Next Generation Sequencing conference in Providence, RI, Patrice Milos, Ph.D. Vice President and Chief Scientific Officer provided an overview of recent technological and scientific initiatives underway at Helicos.

Milos described projects the company undertook in collaboration with world-renowned institutions such as the RIKEN institute in Japan and the Leiden University Medical Center in the Netherlands. Both projects leveraged Helicos’s True Single Molecule Sequencing (tSMS)™ approach to obtain results previously difficult or impossible to achieve with amplification-based sequencing technologies.

The presentations also provided an update of Helicos’s research and development technology initiatives – including a consumables improvement path designed to provide multi-fold improvements to the Helicos™ Genetic Analysis System’s throughput with no changes to the instrument hardware.

Further, Milos described a series of revolutionary single-molecule-only methods under development, which are designed to enable novel forms of genetic analysis including:

• library-free paired-reads with insert sizes in the range of 1 kilobase or greater
• methods for the analysis of picogram amounts of DNA without amplification
• and the direct sequencing of RNA, without the generation of cDNA intermediates.

These methods stem from the Helicos System’s unique ability to detect and sequence single molecules of DNA and RNA directly, freeing researchers from the constraints of amplification, ligation and other complex sample preparation techniques.