A novel approach has been developed by combinations of micro ribonucleic nucleic acid (miRNA) specific reverse transcriptase and hemi-nested real-time polymerase chain reaction (PCR) primers that have been designed to maximize miRNA detection sensitivity and specificity.

The miRNA Panel Assays provide scientists with a convenient way to quickly analyze miRNAs that suggest a correlation with the dysregulations in various cancers, in maintenance, differentiation and reprogramming of stem cells and to look at circulating miRNAs that are regarded as a promising new class of biomarkers.

The real-time PCR assays use SensiSMART with SYBR Green (Bioline USA Inc.; Taunton, MA, USA) to enable detection of extremely low levels of miRNA with high specificity, allowing the discrimination between closely related miRNA sequences. This highly reproducible, sensitive platform has been validated independently by molecular diagnostic and pharmaceutical laboratories and showed superior performance to existing commercial assays.

The Bioline EPIK miRNA Panel Assays were developed for miRNA profiling of cancer samples, biofluids, and stem cells. The EPIK miRNA Panel Assays are the result of collaboration with MiRXES (Singapore). Marco Calzavara, president of Bioline, said, “The release of the EPIK miRNA Panel Assays follows the release of the ISOLATE II miRNA, Biofluids RNA, RNA/DNA/Protein and FFPE RNA/DNA Kits earlier this year and shows the continued commitment of Bioline to produce high quality miRNA kits to help researchers with miRNA expression profiling and quantification and in biomarker discovery.”

Richard L. Eberly, president of Meridian Life Science, Inc. (Cincinnati, OH, USA), the parent company, stated, "We are excited about the release of the EPIK miRNA Panel Assays and the enhanced performance they provide for our important life science customers in the molecular diagnostic and pharmaceutical laboratories and biotechnology companies. We remain committed to the continued expansion of the rapidly growing portfolio of highly specialized molecular biology products from Bioline.”

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