Under an agreement between the parties, Kiko Tech has been appointed sole distributor for the GenNext product portfolio for Japan. Together, GenNext and Kiko Tech will provide sales and marketing, customer service, technical support, training, and related logistical efforts for Flash Oxidation (Fox™) Protein Footprinting Systems.

Kiko Tech is a premier distributor of state-of-the-art instruments and reagents for molecular diagnostics, proteomics, applied testing, pharmaceutical, and academic research since its establishment in 1974. The Kiko Tech team is excited about the opportunity to introduce the Japanese scientific community to the novel Fox™-based approach to Hydroxyl Radical Protein Footprinting (HRPF).

GenNext introduced Fox-Based HRPF to the market as a disruptive, intrinsically scalable approach to protein Higher Order Structure (HOS) analysis to increase the effectiveness and minimize adverse drug reactions of biopharmaceuticals. This protein footprinting method, originally demonstrated in a 2021 Journal of the American Society of Mass Spectrometry paper, is experiencing rapid adoption in North America and Europe by leading biopharmaceutical companies.

A GenNext HRPF study can address scientific questions that previously required difficult, expensive, and time-consuming hydrogen deuterium exchange, nuclear magnetic resonance, X-ray crystallography or cryo-electron microscopy experiments. Alternatively, researchers would have to combine multiple techniques such as circular dichroism spectroscopy, size-exclusion chromatography, and light-scattering analysis to generate less informative results than by conducting a single series of GenNext HRPF experiments.

"The GenNext team is very pleased to collaborate with Kiko Tech to introduce our products to Japan as part of our global expansion program," said Scot R. Weinberger, CEO and Founder of GenNext. He continued, "We anticipate that Japanese biopharmaceutical researchers will be receptive to and adopt HRPF as a new standard to elucidate HOS, and we have found the perfect partner in Kiko Tech who are already active in this area."

"Kiko Tech is excited to bring GenNext products to the Japanese life science community," said Shigenobu Fukushima, General Manager of Kiko Tech. "GenNext’s products move HOS beyond the limitations inherent in current techniques, enabling our customers to discover and develop biopharmaceuticals faster and with higher quality."

In the USA, GenNext will be presenting the capabilities of its platform at the upcoming American Society of Mass Spectrometry meeting (June 5-9, 2022). At the same time, Japanese researchers will be able to learn about the HRPF technique and GenNext products at the Japanese Society of Protein Sciences meeting.