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Health Care Segment

Supporting Vibrant, Healthy Living

Health care related activities are becoming more and more important as society ages, medical treatment becomes more advanced and globalization accelerates. The Mitsubishi Chemical Group is developing health care business in a wide range of areas including diagnostics, clinical testing services, and technologies for drug discovery, while continuing the basic research it has conducted in life sciences over the past several decades. Entering the post-genome era, the Mitsubishi Chemical Group plans to devote efforts to the Health Care Segment as one of its most important businesses, and to contribute to further raising the quality of life of people everywhere.

Diagnostic reagents and instruments

Early diagnosis of disease is of the utmost importance for maintaining and managing health. In July 2003, Mitsubishi Kagaku Medical, Inc., Iatron Laboratories, Inc. and Dia-Iatron Co., Ltd. merged to form Mitsubishi Kagaku Iatron, Inc. The new company supports health management primarily through a fully automated serological immunoassay system (LPIA) and development of RIA reagents for ultra sensitive testing. It is also working to expand its lineup of products for DNA diagnosis, a field where technological innovation is advancing rapidly.

Clinical testing

Mitsubishi Kagaku Bio-Clinical Laboratories, Inc. draws on long-cultivated expertise and cutting-edge technology in providing fast and highly precise clinical testing services. Its steadfast quality supports a wide array of medical and health-related services that contribute to the quality of life. Attesting to this quality, one of the company's laboratories has been accredited by the College of American Pathologists (CAP), another is the only IOC-accredited laboratory enables to perform doping tests in Japan, and other laboratories including the food sanitation and hygiene analysis laboratory have earned ISO 9001 certification.

Support for drug discovery

Leveraging the technology and experience it has cultivated in a range of safety testing activities for industrial chemicals, agrochemicals and other chemicals, Mitsubishi Chemical Safety Institute Ltd. is ramping up contracting work from pharmaceutical companies, a sector where outsourcing is on the rise. The company is the largest contract research organization of non-clinical studies in Japan, and through its pharmacological studies, pharmacokinetic studies and other testing services, it quickly supplies highly accurate data to its customers. In doing so, the company helps pharmaceutical companies expedite and increase the efficiency of their drug development activities.
ZOEGENE Corporation has been promoting its worldwide licensing business on a global scale and the development of resources for drug discovery by making use of the Mitsubishi Chemical Group's accumulated intellectual properties, technologies and research foundations related to genome research and other areas of biotechnology. The company has constructed a series of testing frameworks that cover protein synthesis from cDNAs to drug candidate discovery. It also licenses patented information to pharmaceutical companies and other organizations. Further, in line with customer requests, the company is developing a contracting business on structure and functional analyses of proteins.

Key Word

DNA chip and microarray technology

DNA chips enable comprehensive investigations of genes by concentrating a large number of DNA on glass or silicon substrate then affixing blood after it has been processed. DNA chips can help speed up research related to the material characterization of genes or new drug development, they pave the way for personalized medical care in which treatment is designed in accordance with the bodily makeup of each individual, and otherwise possess an array of possibilities.
Mitsubishi Kagaku Bio-Clinical Laboratories, Inc. is partnering with Hitachi Software Engineering Co., Ltd. to develop DNA chips that can be used in practical applications at medical facilities. The companies have developed a DNA chip that makes possible the advanced diagnosis of septicemia and sepsis, a condition which causes high fevers due to the presence of staphylococci and other pathogens in the blood. In addition to reducing the amount of time required for testing DNA in pathogens from several days to several hours, the partnership is also currently involved in developing DNA chips that can successively predict the efficacy of anticancer agents. Our affiliated company Japan Genome Solutions, Inc. has developed clinical diagnosis systems using cDNA chip and gene expression analysis in order to know patient's response to drugs for hepatitis C or rheumatoid arthritis. The system is currently used in the clinical research activities of the Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare. Mitsubishi Chemical Safety Institute Ltd. has formed an alliance with Affymetrix Japan K.K. an affiliated company of global DNA chip giant Affymetrix, Inc. The company has led the industry in starting comprehensive contract analysis services that cover from consulting on expression analyses using Affymetrix's 'GeneChip' to a variety of tests, RNA sample extractions, and DNA chip-based discovery and analysis.

Proteomics

ZOEGENE Corporation is actively pursing proteomics. Proteomics involves technology to comprehensively research and analyze the proteome (formed from the words 'protein' and 'genome'), an assemblage of all the proteins found in living organisms. The substances that control the physiology of living cells are actually not genes, but proteins which are shaped and formed by genes. Because proteins are the partners to pharmaceuticals in producing beneficial effects and side effects, understanding the whole--which proteins appear in what structures and when, what sorts of physiological effects they generate, etc.--will help in the analysis of pathological conditions and causes of diseases. This understanding is also of significant importance to industries founded on the life sciences. ZOEGENE Corporation is able to freely synthesize the desired protein by combining its comprehensive cDNA library with cell-free protein synthesis. Given its range of possibilities--from developing protein chips for clinical testing to creating completely new drug designs--the company is actively working to make further advances in proteomics.