"Welcome to the exciting capabilities of Nuclea™ Tissue Arrays (TA)- revolutionary technology for high-throughput characterization of gene and protein expression patterns directly on highly-characterized normal and disease-specific tissue sample sets.
Our Tissue Arrays let you access large datasets, for establishing frequency information and discovering therapeutic, diagnostic and prognostic correlations."
So begins the new brochure proclaiming Nuclea's new TMA product line. But hold on, doesn't this all sound rather familiar? A quick check of an old Clinomics catalog confirms my suspicions and remarkable similarities rapidly emerge.
Nuclea Catalog
NDDA NEURODEGENERATIVE DISEASE TISSUE ARRAY
Over 200 samples, Pathologist-reviewed, representing relevant brain regions, including substantia nigra, ventral tegmenta, basal ganglia, for Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, and ALS.
Clinomics Catalog
LD-ND-1 NEURODEGENERATIVE DISEASE SURVEY
Pathologist-reviewed, representing relevant brain regions, including substantia nigra, ventral tegmenta, basal ganglia, for Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, and ALS.
or compare Nuclea's new NEUROPSYCHIATRIC DISEASE TISSUE ARRAY
Over 200 samples, Pathologist-reviewed, representing relevant brain region, including cingulated gyrus, hippocampus, amygdala, temporal lobe, frontal lobe, cortex, for bipolar, schizophrenia, schizoid personality disorder, and major depression. Bilateral representation, with clinically-defined normal brain controls.
with that of Clinomics,
LD-NP-1 NEUROPSYCHIATRIC DISEASE SURVEY
Pathologist-reviewed, representing relevant brain region, including cingulated gyrus, hippocampus, amygdala, temporal lobe, frontal lobe, cortex, for bipolar, schizophrenia, schizoid personality disorder, and major depression. Bilateral representation, with clinically-defined normal brain controls
You can see where this is going by now I guess. Well it doesn't stop there and the entire catalog is a carbon-copy of Clinomics'.
Now here's a question for you. Where did these arrays come from? Were they gifted to him when he was fired? Has he decided to make identical arrays, with identical samples and put them together in a near identical catalog? Or could it be just more of his Tissue of Lies?
Here's the serious bit. If you are planning on putting your research on the line using these products to validate your hard earned data, think very carefully indeed. Garbage in, Garbage out.
"Nuclea Biomarkers, LLC is a biotechnology services company that has developed a novel technology platform to improve greatly the efficiency of drug discovery research. "Well it's clearly not novel and it's very likely to have the opposite effect on your productivity.
9 comments:
FYI:
This guy just purchased a local ski area in Pittsfield for 3 million.
To be announced soon in the media.
Watch for it.
What do you suppose he wants with a ski area?
So Muraca is back !!!
We've moved effortlessly from tissue microarrays to ski areas. To update you on this matter though you might want to read this article
http://pittsfieldgazette.com/judge-rules-in-bousquet-dispute-p2664-95.htm
The line from Daniel Ford, Justice of the Superior Court of Berkshire County was telling:
“In December 2007, Muraca threatened Jervas with expensive and protracted litigation in an attempt to force Jervas to sell the property at a substantially reduced price.”
Where did the tissue for the tissue arrays come from?
It was common knowledge that they came from the tissue banks from Berkshire Medical Center and he used their pathology reports to characterize the tissues.
Also,everyone knew that Clinomics had their own employees present at BMC autopsies to bring fresh tissues directly to Clinomics.
I wonder if the families ever knew that tissues from their loved ones were being shipped, with the hospital's knowledge, to a commercial, for-profit business.
My understanding is that that the TMAs mentioned are the same ones he used to tout years ago and that they were built using tissues sourced via BMC.
Whether the human tissues used their construction were appropriately consented for commercial use is a question that should be put to the Berkshire Medical Center leadership in the first instance.
Clinomics also advertised a tissue repository. The tissues from autopsies were placed in the freezer as part of their repository.
The TMAs were made from BMC's parafin block archives with the accompanying pathology report.
Some more reading:
Even though Nuclea is privately owned, here are the major investors. It's interesting to note that the chairman of the Geometry Group (Lewis) that wanted to buy and build condos on top of Bosquet is also the founder of Vietnam Partners, a major investor.
Check the link in the article for the new SEC filing.
http://dc.citybizlist.com/5/2010/11/2/Backed-by-Vietnam-Partners-Nuclea-Raises-8.9M-–-cbl.aspx
With reference to the use of tissues sourced from autopsies, is there any more you can add to this in terms of whether this was undertaken with the knowledge and approval of the leadership of the places where this took place and whether appropriate consents had been given?
(If you are not happy to post this to the Blog then feel free to email me at nuclea.fallout@gmail.com. There are many people interested in the precise detail of this).
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