Product Overview / Company News

COMPANY PROFILE

Oligos Etc. was founded in 1989 to provide the highest quality DNA and RNA oligonucleotides to the research community.  The resulting DNA/RNA synthesis facility quickly earned an international reputation for quality and for the ability to synthesize and purify unusual and difficult oligos.  Oligos Etc. was soon offering a broad range of modifications including dyes, tags, modified bases and ends, backbones, chimerics, and chemistries.  Profitable in its first full year of operation, Oligos Etc. was able to operate without incurring major deficits or resorting to venture capital funding while becoming a world leader in the production of quality oligonucleotides.

In 1994, Oligos Etc. expanded production and purification capabilities in Oregon to produce pharmaceutical amounts of DNA and RNA.  This addressed the needs of pharmaceutical companies and the biotechnology community, as well as internal requirements.  The expansion phase was completed in 1995 with a 17,000 square-foot facility that contains a multi-suite controlled area for purification, a multiple line purification area, purification equipment to handle grams of oligo at a time, three large scale synthesizers as well as 20 multicolumn units for small scale (50 nm to 1 µm) synthesis, and a full Quality Program.  Oligos Etc. offers a complete range of products and guaranteed purification levels from gel purification to HPLC Level II purity (95-99% full length).  Oligos Etc. serves clients throughout the United States, in more than 40 countries worldwide and from all arenas:  academic, governmental, institutional, pharmaceutical, diagnostic, hospital, and biotech.

Of critical importance to Oligos Etc. was the Research and Development in areas of interest to the DNA and RNA field.  An extremely efficient second-generation antisense technology was developed and patented which is routinely offered to customers to aid in their Gene Validation for Target Drug Discovery programs.  Oligos Etc. personnel have been extremely successful at target site selection, design of effective antisense oligos, and their synthesis and purification for pharmaceutical and biotech companies.  Four compounds are generally designed for each target, but experience has shown that the first or second selection offers quite effective inhibition of gene expression in cell lines.  These compounds show little or no toxicity compared to phosphorothioate oligos, great specificity to the target, and an extraordinarily high level of effectiveness.  Other developments include a proprietary purification technique, chimerics that offer various critical advantages, and a gene construction kit service.  Oligos Etc. has also achieved success developing alternative proprietary chemistries and optimized chimeras in the nucleic acid therapeutic arena.

The demand for oligo products manufactured under the current Good Manufacturing Practices (cGMP) has grown tremendously in the recent past, and Oligos Etc. now offers full GMP oligos made to your specifications and at any scale for use in diagnostic tests as ASRs* (analyte specific reagents) as well as therapeutic projects.  Housed in a separate area with controlled purification capabilities, our GMP facility addresses customer needs for both research and production.

 

*For Class I ASRs:  "Analyte Specific Reagent.  Analytical and performance characteristics are not established."  No other statement regarding analytical or clinical performance is made.

 

PRODUCT OVERVIEW

Oligos Etc. offers a full line of dyes, tags, and modifications, including fluorescent tags, conjugates, 3' and 5' amino modifiers, thiol modifiers, and minor nucleotides.  In addition, Oligos Etc. can provide a range of antisense oligos including p-ethoxy oligos, phosphorothioates, chimerics and 2' O-methyl linkages.  Oligos with specialty bases, exceedingly long oligos, and oligos for diagnostic kits are also available.

Purification of oligos is a specialty at Oligos Etc.  We synthesize oligos with primer grade purification at no additional charge, and we are the only company that offers Level I and Level II HPLC purification of oligonucleotides in addition to Research Grade HPLC purification and gel purification.

Oligos Etc. recently introduced optimized antisense oligomers. These oligos have several important advantages over uniformly phosphorothioate-substituted DNA, including fewer phosphorothioate linkages, increased hybrid affinity, and reduced non-specific effects.