California companies Affymetrix Inc. of Santa Clara and Arcturus Bioscience Inc. of Mountain View are working jointly to develop tools to enable gene-expression analysis on paraffin-embedded clinical biopsy samples. Arcturus' Paradise reagents can extract and amplify RNA from the samples, which are suitable for gene-expression analysis when used with Affymetrix's GeneChip human genome X3P custom microarray.

The array, designed to detect shorter RNAs, will enable the study of roughly 44,000 of the most well characterized human gene transcripts in archived samples. Analyzing them could help determine why patients did or did not respond to certain treatments and may provide more information on which genes are involved in disease mechanisms.