siTOOLs Biotech Company History

History

The story of siTOOLs Biotech



siTOOLs Biotech, co-founded by Dr. Michael Hannus and Prof. Gunter Meister in September 2013, is a spin-out of Intana Bioscience in Munich and the University of Regensburg, Germany.

Michael was initially from Cenix Bioscience, one of the first RNA interference (RNAi) service companies, and gained many years of hands-on experience in RNAi screening and validation from its earliest days. Seeing off-target effects dominate results with conventional RNAi reagents, Michael decided to test the concept of complex but defined siRNA pools (siPOOLs) to "dilute" off- target effects and increase knock down specificity.

Supported by Intana Bioscience and the German EXIST program, Michael joined forces with Gunter Meister, a pioneer in RNAi biochemistry, to develop siPOOLs from proof-of-concept to a commercial product that entered the market beginning of 2014. In 2015, Prof. Sven Diederichs, expert in non-coding RNA research, joined siTOOLs' Advisory Board, strengthening siTOOLs' expertise in RNA interference and RNA-protein interactions.

siTOOLs Biotech provides reagents to a growing number of researchers from both academia and industry within Europe, US and Asia. Working from Munich Martinsried's dynamic biotech cluster, siTOOLs Biotech applies its proprietary technology with the aim of having RNAi to live up to its full potential and early promises – as an extremely versatile, fast and cost-effective method to study gene function in a broad range of experimental setups.

In later years, siTOOLs Biotech launched new products, raPOOLs (Dec 2015) and riboPOOLs (Jan 2019). Following a similar pooling approach but towards biotinylated DNA probes, raPOOLs enabled robust RNA affinity purification to elucidate gene function biochemically. To support the growing use of Next-Generation Sequencing, riboPOOLs were developed as an efficient, affordable ribosomal RNA depletion solution that could be applied towards any species.

siTOOLs Biotech continues to strive towards equipping the modern day scientist with tools for easy, specific and robust analysis of gene function.



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