Levelling The Playing Field

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They say money makes the world go around — and most researchers would be hard pressed to disagree.
In an effort to produce the best data, cutting-edge technology is often a necessity. The required financial commitment, however, can be prohibitive to academics and smaller biotechnology and pharmaceutical companies.
According to Neil Winegarden, it was this disparity that facilitated the launch of the Toronto-based University Health Network (UHN) Microarray Centre in 1998.

Bang for Your Buck
“The initial idea was to create microarray technology . . . so that researchers in Toronto would have access to them, and they would be made available at an affordable cost.
“The cost was fairly prohibitive, particularly for Canadian researchers,” Winegarden continues. “They knew they were going to need some kind of advantage to be able to get these things affordably, and that was really our initial mandate.”
Winegarden was the centre’s second employee and currently serves as its head of operations. Established as part of a consortium of Toronto-based research institutions — including the University of Toronto, Mount Sinai Hospital, the Hospital for Sick Children and the Ontario Cancer Institute — the centre was partially modelled after Stanford University (Stanford, CA) medical school’s successful Microarray Core Facility.
“Stanford was obviously the leader at the time,” Winegarden explains. “(It was) providing arrays to a lot of other institutions and groups, but it was doing so more as a collaborative thing.”
While Stanford’s approach was based more on research partnerships, UHN’s method was commercially minded, making the arrays available to any and all potential buyers, regardless of affiliation — or geography, for that matter.
“At the time, there just weren’t that many people doing it, and the ones that were doing it didn’t necessarily have the capacity to do it outside of their local groups,” Winegarden says. In this respect, the UHN centre was a trailblazer of sorts.
“We were one of the first academic groups — actually I think we were the first — to provide those . . . to just about anybody that wanted them,” he adds.
While the centre was initially designed to service academics with limited budgets, it quickly expanded its mandate, offering its wares to clients in both public- and private-sector organizations, both within and beyond Canada’s borders.
“We do work with commercial groups doing service contacts and collaborations,” Winegarden explains. “We work with government research groups. We even have contracts with some U.S. military research centers.”
In less than two years, word of the centre and what it could offer had spread.
“Since 2000 we’ve shipped to over 700 labs around the world, (to) about 28 different countries,” Winegarden says. “Currently, we’re shipping to around 300 labs around the world.”
This success, Winegarden says, has lead to increased competition, as arrays are being offered at lower costs across the board — a trend for which he thinks the UHN Microarray Centre can take partial credit.
“Our commercial competition has dramatically dropped their prices,” he says. “I would like to think, in part, (it is) due to groups like us setting the bar lower and making it easier for the customers to get in.”

The Old and the New
The centre offers a variety of different arrays, having first focused on an emerging research trend.
“We started specifically making arrays for gene expression analysis, and we focused at the time on yeast and human clone sets. That was partially because that’s what the researchers that initially started this work were interested in,” Winegarden explains.
“The original arrays were about $40 a piece, which was relatively affordable for people at that point in time,” he adds.
Among the formats the centre currently offers are human arrays (8K, 10K, and 19K cDNA, and 12K CpG islands) and mouse arrays (7.4K, 15K, and 22.4K cDNA, and 7.3KCpG islands), in addition to yeast 6.4K ORFs and customized arrays.
Winegarden says that many new arrays are in development, including the soon-to-be-launched HEEBO and MEEBO oligo arrays. The centre also plans to branch out into largely untapped array markets.
“What we’re going to do as well is to try and do for protein array technologies what we did for DNA array technologies,” he explains. “There aren’t many protein array technologies out there, and the ones that are out there are very expensive. We think now is the time for us to come up with some cost-effective protein array technologies and get them into the hands of researchers and enable them to do that kind of research.”
But products aren’t the only commodities that the UHN Microarray Centre offers. The arrays, after all, are but part of the research equation — and the cheaper part, at that.
“For local customers, we have traditionally provided access to a set of scanners,” Winegarden says. “One of the things we want to do toward enabling research, is we want to get rid of some of the overhead burden of having to acquire the equipment, because it’s relatively expensive. So we purchased a couple of scanners that we allow people to access and sign out on a couple-of-hours-at-a-time window.”
Of course, international clientele can’t be expected to make the trek to Toronto for a two-hour scanner session. But Winegarden says that the centre offers alternate solutions for long-distance customers.
“We would love to be able to ship a scanner with every array purchase, but it’s kind of beyond our means,” he jokes. “What we have done to actually address that is we have started to offer a full service where people . . . send us their RNA samples and then we do the rest of the work for them and send them back the data.
“They can either have us simply do the labelling, hybridization and scanning, and then send them back the images . . . or they can actually have us take it to the point where we do a fairly standard analysis for them and send back the data, (which) gets them a little bit further along.”

A Helping Hand
Regardless of where the client is located, sometimes they need a little push, which the UHN centre can also provide.
“If they’re not used to, or experienced with, processing the data, we can give them a head start and help them out with trying to identify significant changers, as well as identify some pathways that those genes might be involved in.”
In addition, the centre runs training sessions for newcomers to microarray research.
“It’s open to everybody,” Winegarden says. “We’ve had a range of people that want to get trained because they are going to be doing this work. We’ve had people that wanted to get trained even though they were going to get us to do the work, so that when they write the manuscript they understand better what was being done. We also get people, for example, from commercial companies that are going to be supporting key pieces of hardware who just want to understand the process so that they are more familiar with it when they are talking to their customers.”
In this particular arena, the UHN centre seems to be maintaining its international presence, attracting attendees from around the world.
“We’ve trained people from Asia, from places like Thailand and Australia,” Winegarden says. “We’ve trained people from around the world. Obviously the $100 (course fee) isn’t much of a problem if they’re willing to fly half way around the world.”
The key to the program’s success, according to Winegarden, is keeping the training sessions as intimate as possible.
“We try and keep the groups small — about four people at a time — so that it really is hands-on,” he explains. “They’re not watching somebody do it, they’re actually involved.”

New Digs
The training sessions now take place in a space much more conducive to learning. In October 2005, the UHN Microarray Centre moved from its cramped quarters at Toronto General Hospital into the brand new Toronto Medical Discovery Tower in the MaRS Discovery District.
“The nice thing about the scientific tower here was that it was purpose-built,” Winegarden says. “It was specifically built to house labs. Our floor was specifically built with housing the microarray center in mind, and so it’s been built exactly how we needed it.”
Winegarden says this attention to detail at MaRS bodes well for the centre’s future.
“It shows there’s some commitment on the side of the institution,” he says. “They’ve given us this space, they’ve enabled us to move into this new facility so that we can continue to grow and build new products and get them out to people. It’s nice to have that backing and support. It’s fairly necessary. It’s not just about getting grants, it’s not just about getting customers — you need to be given the resources. The institution has to give us that backing, and they have, and that’s great.”
That backing will come in handy as the centre moves forward. Winegarden is hopeful that with the proper funding, the UHN centre can maintain its standing in the microarray business.
“It’s partly predicting where the next in-demand product’s going to come from and it’s also trying to project ahead of the technology curve in some ways.
“We’ve got to show people stuff that they didn’t know they needed,” Winegarden adds jokingly. “We’ve got some cool things that we’re working on and we’d like to get them into people’s hands.”