Advantages of PBIO's Novel Shredder System - Analyst Blog

Grant Zeng, CFA

Advantages of PBIO’s Novel Shredder System to be Presented at the US HUPO Annual Meeting

On March 21, 2011, Pressure BioSciences, Inc. (PBIO) announced that data supporting multiple advantages of the Company’s recently released, novel Shredder System for initial sample processing will be presented this week at the US HUPO annual meeting. The data was generated by academic and biotechnology scientists working in collaboration with researchers at PBIO.

The US Human Proteomic Organization (US HUPO)’s annual meeting is one of the more important meetings held each year focusing on proteins. Hundreds of scientists from throughout the world are expected to attend. The meeting is being held in Raleigh, NC from March 20-23, 2011.

As a reminder, PBIO launched three novel products in December 2010 targeting the drug discovery and development market. Two of the Company’s new products mitochondrial kits are focused on the isolation of mitochondria from solid tissues, such as skeletal muscle and lung. The third new product is a small, portable instrument The SHREDDER SG3 developed in conjunction with the mitochondrial kits, to allow for a safe, rapid, efficient, and standardized method to isolate mitochondria from human and animal cells. When paired with mitochondrial kits, The SHREDDER SG3 offers researchers a semi-automated, rapid, and reproducible method that will generate high quality mitochondria preparations for analysis. The SHREDDER SG3 can also be used for a multitude of other sample preparation processes by an estimated 80,000 research laboratories and 450,000 research scientists working in the biological sciences worldwide.

At the US HUPO meeting, PBIO will present data in collaboration with researchers from the Harvard Catalyst LITT (Harvard CTSC), the Brigham and Women’s Hospital (Harvard University), Target Discovery, Inc.. These data will demonstrate many advantages of the above new products to current methods for the extraction of mitochondria from skeletal muscle and lung, including convenience, reproducibility, and cost savings.

Researchers have processed a diverse range of sample types, including lung, muscle, leaves, seeds, rice, worms, human ovarian tumor tissue, and ticks using PBIO’s novel shredder system. In all cases, the PBI Shredder System efficiently disrupted the samples and the bio-molecules released were of excellent quality and yield.

Although the PBI Shredder System is powerful enough to break apart tough samples like muscle, seeds, and ticks, it is also gentle enough to extract intact and functional mitochondria from different tissue types. This is important, because defects in mitochondria have been implicated in a number of diseases and disorders. Importantly, certain samples that were initially disrupted by the PBI Shredder System were further processed in the Company’s patented, powerful pressure cycling technology (PCT) sample preparation system, resulting in increased yield from the samples.

Scientists around the world routinely extract bio-molecules from a diverse range of biological samples using a variety of extraction methods. Some methods are labor-intensive, time consuming, and expensive; others engender safety and quality concerns; and still others lack the versatility required for today’s cutting-edge research laboratory. Data so for have demonstrated that the PBI Shredder System offers many advantages such as greater safety, flexibility, quality, and speed than the currently used methods.

The bottom line is that with its many advantages, the PBIO Shredder System will be recognized and used by more scientists and researchers worldwide. As a result, the Company’s top line will be further boosted in the coming years.

We remain optimistic about PBIO. The Company has strong fundamentals and is on track to deliver shareholder value. We maintain our Outperform rating on the Company’s shares and reiterate our price target of $5.

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