Transnetyx
Why Transnetyx’s business matters
Transnetyx lets clients send in samples of their mice (getting a tail tip or an ear piece at birth will do) and the company’s robotic system figures out which mice have the mutations clients need for their research. Other species like rats, zebrafish, goats and rabbits are permitted, but less common.
“It’s like a blood test, but for mouse genetics,” Bean said. “It’s a strange little business.”
The company’s business would be hard to imagine 25 years ago. But a discovery by geneticist Mario Capecchi in 1995 — how to delete the genome of a mouse to make it more effective for research purposes — transformed the field and set the stage for Transnetyx’s birth.
“Now you could make a genetic model of a human disorder in a living organism, so you could study therapy on a living organism,” Bean said. “That’s why if you go to a university, there are buildings full of genetically modified mice.”
Someone must test the animals, however, to see if they inherited the necessary mutations. That’s where Transnetyx’s service comes in, if a researcher determines genotyping is too costly time-wise to perform in-house.
Many do. The “strange little business” is now drawing 300,000 samples a month from institutions based both in the United States and internationally — about 20 percent of Transnetyx’s business comes from Europe and Australia, Bean said.
Bean calculates Transnetyx has saved its clients about 1,800 years of research total, assuming the research is done 220 days out of the year. The number underlies the need for geneticists to know which lab animals have the mutations necessary for the tests they’re conducting.
“That’s a lot of time back to the industry to do something more valuable than genotyping a mouse,” Bean said of the hundreds of years saved. “We really try to give them back time that they can use to discover something significant.”
How Transnetyx’s process works
Efficiency is vital in Transnetyx’s automated genotyping process, and the more time that can be saved with technology, the better. Clients find out their samples’ results following a process that lasts 24 to 72 hours.
Throughout a tour of Transnetyx’s lab off Germantown Parkway, Bean pointed out steps of the process that have or soon will be sped up with faster, more heavily involved machines.
“Eighty percent of our samples will go through without ever having to be looked at by a human being,” Bean said. “They can literally travel from the backdoor, where Fedex drops them off, through our process and results can be put online for the customer without us having to look at it.”
Transnetyx’s process goes like this: Clients load tissue samples into a plate, and that plate is shipped to the company’s Cordova facility. The barcode on that plate arrives via Memphis-based Fedex and is scanned and placed into the company’s system so the sample can be tracked.
A robot breaks down each tissue sample and, with the help of magnetic beads, obtains pure columns of mouse DNA ready to be detected for mutation.
“All it’s doing is getting the samples ready to go to the other room to be processed,” Bean said.
Once purified and extracted, a robot links the DNA with custom molecular probes designed to find the mutations.
“It’s kind of like a molecular bird dog,” Bean said. “It’s going to go into the DNA, and it’s going to look for that target.”