Roche, ATCC forge marketing alliance to provide transfection data

INDIANAPOLIS—Roche Diagnostics and its Roche Applied Science division announced recently a world­wide marketing and infor­mation distribution deal with Manassas, Va.-based ATCC focused on transfec­tion reagents from Roche and ATCC's industry-leading cell lines. Aimed at providing vital information to life sci­ence researchers and speed­ing the pace of their work, the collaboration intends to provide data via each organi­zation's Web site on transfec­tion of ATCC cell lines using Roche's FuGENE reagents either by Roche sci­entists or via information culled from peer-reviewed publications.

"The work we are doing with ATCC continues Roche's focus of giving scientists easy access to information that will help them in their work and of selling the science first," says Lou Welebob, director of mar­keting for Roche Diagnostics.

As part of the agreement, both Roche and ATCC will provide information about which cell lines have been successfully transfected using Roche reagents and will also provide detailed information and direct links to each others's Web sites with the intent of encouraging researchers to buy both cell lines from ATCC and Roche's FuGENE products.

Much of the information Roche provides was already resident online, as the company actively keeps track of, and stores infor­mation about, its products when cited in peer-reviewed journals, says Jeffrey Emch, product man­ager, proteomics at Roche. "What we have done now is to focus on creating specific links between our application data and the specific cell lines from ATCC," he says.

At the heart of the deal is the desire, say officials from both orga­nizations, to provide researchers with the highest quality cell lines and reagents to help researchers ensure their experiments yield valid results the first time.

"This partnership with Roche serves to remind life scientists to treat cell lines as key experimen­tal components," says Michael Gove, VP of marketing and sales for ATCC. "Authenticated bio­logical materials are critical to the accuracy and reproducibility of scientific research. By combining low-passage, authenticated ATCC cell lines with quality transfection reagents like FuGENE reagents from Roche Applied Science, we have increased the chance for suc­cessful results in the labs."

The way Emch sees it, having the validated information available to researchers is one way of getting them to think about the quality of both the cells they use and the methods they've used in the past to obtain cells for their experiments.

"A high number of researchers are getting both their information and their cells from within their organization or from their col­leagues," he says. "But how much do they know about the cells? Are they the same cells or have they become contaminated? It is a com­mon way of getting cells, but it leaves a lot of unknown."

In addition to results from journals or from Roche scientists, Roche will also allow researchers to post their information about transfection of ATCC cells using FuGENE. While, these results won't be validated right away, it is still solid scientific information that has the potential to help cus­tomers of both companies.