Splice Array for Clinical Markers in Blood Launched by Jivan Biologics

Berkeley, CA (June 1, 2005)--A splice variant microarray for clinical markers in blood was launched today by Jivan Biologics, Inc., a privately held company. Manufactured by Agilent Technologies and available as a catalogue product, Jivan's TransExpress™ Whole Blood enables drug companies to discover splice isoform-based biomarkers and molecular diagnostics for human disease.

"The quest for clinically relevant biomarkers already constitutes a large portion of the half billion dollar a year microarray market," said Subha Srinivasan, PhD, CEO and Founder of Jivan Biologics. "By detecting RNA splicing events in patient samples, TransExpress™ Whole Blood places Jivan at the forefront of a market shift from gene arrays to splice arrays that can detect four or more times the number of potential biomarkers and molecular diagnostics as a conventional gene array."

With patent-pending technology for splice variant detection, TransExpress™ Whole Blood includes 31,765 probes for 30,042 alternatively spliced sites for 19,770 splice isoforms of 2,928 human genes expressed in whole blood.

TransExpress™ Whole Blood works with standard hybridization kits and scanners available from Agilent Technologies and other vendors.

This announcement follows Jivan's launch yesterday of TransExpress™ Whole Spliceome, the first genome-wide splice variant arrays. By comparison, TransExpress™ Whole Blood provides an application-based product at a lower price point, taking advantage of the fact that only a small percentage of human genes are expressed in any given tissue.

TransExpress™ Whole Blood can be ordered online at http://www.jivanbio.com.

Jivan Biologics empowers scientists with new insight by providing a full catalogue of splice variant arrays for drug development and biological research. Available as a service since 2001 and as catalogue products since 2003, Jivan's flagship TransExpress™ arrays are the first commercial microarrays for alternative splicing.