In July 2010, Affomix was acquired by Illumina (NASDAQ: ILMN). Affomix Corporation had been developing technology that permits high throughput production and screening of antibodies against virtually all human proteins, both as encoded and post-translationally modified. Founded, in part, on research licensed by Affomix from a large pharmaceutical company the firm produced comprehensive libraries to isolate antibodies against at least two epitopes of each of the vast majority of proteins in the human proteome (Affomix defined a complete set of these antibodies as an 'affomeTM). With such antibodies in hand, the Companys mission was to generate high complexity antibody microarrays for simultaneous qualitative and quantitative analyses of literally thousands of different proteins - microarrays that would be superior not only to existing antibody arrays but also, for many applications, to nucleic acid microarrays.
