Kinexus Bioinformatics Corporation, the
world-leader in tracking key cell communication proteins, announced today the
availability of its first Internet accessible, cell signaling proteomics
database with built in bioinformatics searching capabilities. KiNET is
the world’s only functional proteomics database available to the health care
research community and features over 200,000 measurements of the expression
levels and phosphorylation states of hundreds of signal transduction proteins
from hundreds of different biological specimens, including over 200 tumor cell
lines.
The proteins tracked in KiNET are critical for the operation of all
cell and tissue types, as their malfunction has been linked to over 400
diseases including cancer, cardiovascular and neurodegenerative diseases.
Subscribing clients are able to search KiNET to plan out their next research
project, discover potential drug targets and biomarkers for disease, or to
better understand which pathways are regulated in response to various drugs
and other treatments.
“The highly unique dataset contained in KiNET has been collected from the
results of our Kinetworks immunoblotting services performed over the last
6 years, at a cost of over 8 million dollars,” said Dr. Steven Pelech,
President and Founder of Kinexus and a Professor at the University of British
Columbia. “Over 95% of the KiNET data is unpublished and not available
elsewhere. It was produced in-house using the same reagents and methodology by
our highly experienced scientists and technicians to ensure that it is fully
comparable.” The goal of Kinexus since its inception in 1999 has been to
provide the biomedical research community with the ability to simultaneously
track hundreds of key communication proteins to facilitate understanding of
normal and disease processes at the molecular level. Several pharmaceutical
companies have expressed an interest in licensing the KiNET database in-house.
KiNET can be queried for the regulation of a target protein in hundreds
of well defined experimental model systems, or a treatment or cell/tissue type
can be interrogated for changes in the expression and phosphorylation of
hundreds of different signaling proteins. In addition to offering KiNET to the
general public, Kinexus intends to mine the database for interesting drug
targets and disease biomarkers.
