To Todd Dehm, every mouse tail tells a story. A miniscule tail sample, slightly longer than the thickness of a dime, can reveal enough about the animal’s genetic traits to make or break a scientific experiment. And that can save scientists, who use millions of research mice each year, both time and money. The rarer […]
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To Todd Dehm, every mouse tail tells a story. A miniscule tail sample, slightly longer than the thickness of a dime, can reveal enough about the animal's genetic traits to make or break a scientific experiment. And that can save scientists, who use millions of research mice each year, both time and money. The rarer specialty mice can cost $100 or more each.
Dehm is co-founder of Genotyping Center of America, in Bangor, which tests mouse tails to help assure its customers that their mice have the precise genetic makeup for their experiments. As Dehm sees it, the $5 “genotype” genetic test is money well spent. Though GTCA — also the initials of the four chemical bases in DNA — is just over a year old, he expects demand for testing from research laboratories, which perform mice experiments to better understand human disease and potential treatments, to fatten company revenues into the millions of dollars in five years.
Dehm and his co-founders, Carrie LeDuc and Kat Taylor, are former and current employees of The Jackson Laboratory in Bar Harbor. Dehm recently spoke to Mainebiz about GTCA and the intricacies of the mouse tail. An edited transcript follows.
Mainebiz: What service do you offer?
Todd Dehm: We offer genotyping services to the academic community. Genotyping is looking at specific locations in the specimen's genome and finding out what traits it has. Most of our samples are from genetically modified organisms, where something is purposely done to the genome to make it suitable for research. We also look at normal mice that had a spontaneous mutation the customer is interested in.
MB: What information do customers want?
TD: The customer is interested in looking at the genetics of the mice they have. They take a small section of the tail tip or an ear clip and send it to us at room temperature overnight. We perform a polymerase chain reaction on that sample to amplify a targeted piece of the DNA, and then we look at it with a real-time instrument and are able to determine whether that sample [has the mutation] the customer is looking for. And then we design our own assays (test probes). We do two assays on every sample to determine its genotype, because if there are any unknown mutations, they could affect the genotype and you could get a false result. So we increase our chances of being right.
MB: What can you learn from a tiny piece of tail?
TD: The Jackson Laboratory could very easily sequence the entire genome and know everything about that mouse. We aren't equipped yet for that. The laboratories that use us have mice in a colony and they need to know whether they are appropriate to go into their research program. The earlier they do that, the less expensive it is. The genotyping has to be spot on. If they use the wrong mouse, it could damage their research for years in the future. And they need to know which ones to breed. If they breed the wrong mice, they could also damage their research.
MB: Who are your customers?
TD: We're only at academic institutions like the University of Texas at Austin, the University of Alabama at Birmingham and the University of Maryland at Baltimore now. We want to be a little more established to be ready for a big pharmaceutical company, because they have large, large colonies of mice and if we can get them as a customer, that will be a huge influx of samples for us.
MB: Could GTCA be considered a spinout of The Jackson Laboratory?
TD: Not officially. We haven't got any support from them. It's been entirely funded by myself and Carrie, plus a small amount from Kat, and of course, sales. We've invested close to $80,000. We've got enough sales to pay our bills. We are not currently taking salaries. We're looking to find angel investors to raise somewhere between $250,000 and $500,000. That would make it possible for us to grow a lot faster.
MB: How did you get the price per test so low?
TD: I bought a lot of our current equipment on eBay. We've priced things [at $5 per test] such that we can do the genotyping for the same price or cheaper than customers can do it in-house, plus we have the expertise.
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