Guiding researchers with cutting edge dPCR technology

Mogens Kruhøffer starts his mornings watching the water. He lives directly by the sea in Aarhus, on the east coast of Denmark’s Jutland peninsula. An avid swimmer, diver, boater and spearfisherman, Kruhøffer sits back and takes in “all the boats, the canoes, the sailboats, the motorboats just in front of my windows every morning,” he says. “I can sit for hours and just watch it. And that's really a good way to avoid stress. It's wonderful.”

A Danish native, Kruhøffer was drawn to Denmark’s second largest city (after Copenhagen) not only because of its seaside lifestyle, but because it has one of the world’s best hospitals, Aarhus University Hospital, where he worked for several years as a researcher in bladder and colorectal cancer. He intimately understands how clinical researchers are on a quest to better understand the molecular underpinnings of health and medicine to make breakthroughs in treatment and care.

He also understands that many of these researchers have not only patient care on their plate but also administrative duties to manage and students to train so they rarely have time to keep up with the latest technological advances that can both make research projects easier and give more detailed results. “How could they possibly also keep track of methods and technologies being developed all the time?” Kruhøffer says.

Applying the right technology

That’s where his company BioXpedia comes in. Founded in 2016, BioXpedia is “a contract research organization offering analytical services within genomics, proteomics and for small molecules,” says Kruhøffer, its founder and CEO. “Our mission is to support clinical research groups in hospitals and in universities, biotech companies, and pharma in their research.”

He saw the potential for technological advances to make research easier and better. “I'm very passionate about technologies, because for many years I've been working hands-on in laboratories,” he says. Cumbersome manual processing used to keep him in the lab late into the night. “With the new technologies, the speed of which you get from pure sample to data is amazing.”

While 90% of BioXpedia’s customers are clinical researchers, an increasing number of biotech startups and pharmaceutical companies drawn to Aarhus are also using BioXpedia’s services.

“The most important factor for biotech companies is often time,” he notes. “They have to reach certain milestones within a certain time to get the next amount of funding. So it's very important for them that they run analysis of the new molecules that they're developing all the time and get results fast. So we have hired new staff and bought the equipment to do so.”

dPCR to supplement qPCR

BioXpedia focuses on advanced technological offerings, including qPCR analysis of gene expression, transcriptomics (including RNA library prep and sequencing), genotyping services, protein analysis, bioinformatics and, most recently dPCR, using QIAGEN’s QIAcuity. About three-quarters of BioXpedia’s lab equipment that is used for the extraction of molecules is from QIAGEN, Kruhøffer says.

One of the newest QIAGEN instruments in the BioXpedia lab is the QIAcuity, a digital PCR instrument. It’s been in the lab only a few months, but after getting some lessons in its use, they’ve already begun to analyze samples. “I must say, I'm impressed. The software is very intuitive and easy to use, and the whole workflow is easy to use. We're very happy about that instrument.”

Kruhøffer says their dPCR services are meant to supplement their qualitative PCR work not replace it. And yet, he notes, “The digital PCR has some very obvious advantages against the qPCR. It is very robust and has a very high precision. Instead of a qPCR where you need to make a standard curve and where you need to have reference genes to compare the gene expression level, the digital PCR is more or less a digital counting of molecules.”

He continues, “It's amazing technology. It gives you the opportunity to compare data from different laboratories and from different countries, because the PCR reaction is not dependent on the efficiency of the reaction. In digital PCR, you only need to see, is there a product or is there no product? And then you can count it. That gives you a much better comparability between data. I believe digital PCR has a bright future.”

Aha moments

Kruhøffer is excited to offer the QIAcuity to more researchers in seaside Aarhus and see what breakthroughs they might make with it.

“One of the very recent ‘Aha moments’ I've had was when I learned that the QIAcuity may be used to quantify proteins and even protein-protein interactions. The human body is an electrical organism, and there's a lot of signals going on all the time. We used to say it's the genes doing that, but actually it's more the proteins doing all the work.”

He says, “If you can look at protein-protein interactions in QIAcuity, there would be almost an infinite number of assays that you could develop for the instrument. I believe that if you can develop such assays, you will have a very easy and cost-effective way to do analysis.

This is really interesting for BioXpedia, because we already screen more than 1,500 proteins at a time and it is quite expensive to screen that many proteins. After such screens, we obviously want to investigate interesting proteins from such a screen further using the QIAcuity. We just need the assays, and then we can offer this to our customers. I think it’s opening a whole new field.”