St. Louis, MO, June 23, 2009 – Sigma-Aldrich (NASDAQ: SIAL) today announced the release of over 2,300 antibody additions to its Prestige Antibodies® powered by Atlas Antibodies product line (www.sigma.com/prestige), bringing the total number of highly validated antibodies to over 6,100. Developed by the Human Proteome Resource, these antibodies are available to customers immediately through an exclusive partnership between Sigma-Aldrich and Atlas Antibodies. Prestige Antibodies can provide significant time and cost savings for researchers because they are optimized on a single protocol, resulting in efficient and effective applications.
This addition to the Prestige Antibodies product line is a step toward the Human Proteome Resource’s goal to develop at least one antibody to all 22,000 non-redundant human proteins by 2015.
“With this latest addition to the Prestige Antibodies line, Sigma-Aldrich has significantly expanded our antibody offerings, the latest step in our long-term plan to lead the industry in high-quality antibody content,” said Dr. David Smoller, President of Sigma-Aldrich’s Research Biotech Business Unit. “Our highly validated Prestige Antibodies are ideal for a number of applications, and with our unique online tools we help scientists figure out how to best incorporate them into prospective experiments.”
Prestige Antibodies are supported by the publicly available data of the Human Protein Atlas (HPA), part of HUPO’s Human Antibody Initiative. Multiple quality assurance testing steps ensure that Prestige Antibodies are highly specific to their targets. Each Prestige Antibody is also associated with over 500 tissue immunohistochemistry (IHC) images, over 100 cell/line immunocytochemistry (ICC) images, immunofluorescence (IF) and western blotting (WB) data, all publicly accessible via the Human Protein Atlas (www.proteinatlas.org).
In August 2008, Sigma-Aldrich added over 2,000 Prestige Antibodies to the existing antibody product line. The rapid expansion of the Sigma-Aldrich Prestige Antibodies gives an increasing number of scientists the ability to save resources and facilitate high-throughput applications in proteomics and cell biology research.
Prestige Antibodies can be found at www.sigma.com/prestige, where customers can search for antibodies via specific gene name and ID, or by selecting individual chromosomes. Prestige Antibodies are also included in Sigma-Aldrich’s Your Favorite Gene powered by Ingenuity (www.sigma-aldrich.com/yfg), an award winning Web-based biological search portal for exploring dynamic gene-based content.
About Sigma-Aldrich: Sigma-Aldrich is a leading Life Science and High Technology company. Its biochemical and organic chemical products and kits are used in scientific research, including genomic and proteomic research, biotechnology, pharmaceutical development and as key components in pharmaceutical, diagnostic and other high technology manufacturing. The Company has customers in life science companies, university and government institutions, hospitals, and in industry. Over one million scientists and technologists use its products. Sigma-Aldrich operates in 38 countries and has 7,800 employees providing excellent service worldwide. Sigma-Aldrich is committed to Accelerating Customer Success through Innovation and Leadership in Life Science, High Technology and Service. For more information about Sigma-Aldrich, please visit its award-winning Web site at http://www.sigma-aldrich.com.
About Atlas Antibodies: Atlas Antibodies was founded in 2006 by researchers at the Royal Institute of Technology (KTH) in Stockholm and the Rudbeck Laboratory, Uppsala University in Uppsala, Sweden. Atlas Antibodies will handle the production, marketing and sales of the antibody products developed and validated in the Human Proteome Resource (HPR) Center. The Human Proteome Resource (HPR) Center is performing a systematic exploration of the human proteome with Affinity (Antibody) based Proteomics, combining high-throughput generation of affinity-purified (mono-specific) antibodies with protein profiling using tissue microarrays. The Human Proteome Resource (HPR) Center is located in Stockholm and Uppsala, Sweden and is running the Swedish Human Protein Atlas (HPA) program. The HPA program generates expression and localization patterns of proteins in a large portion of both normal and cancer human tissues and organs resulting in the antibody-based profiling presented in the publicly available Human Protein Atlas (HPA) (http://www.proteinatlas.org). The HPA vision is to enable the systematic generation of quality assured antibodies to all non-redundant human proteins and to use these reagents to functionally explore human proteins, protein variants and protein interactions.
Cautionary Statement: This release contains forward-looking statements relating to future strategic actions and initiatives and similar intentions and beliefs and other statements regarding the Company’s expectations, beliefs, intentions and the like, which involve assumptions regarding the Company’s operations and conditions in the markets the Company serves. The Company does not undertake any obligation to update these forward-looking statements.
