I am looking for a good way to generate a list (at least 1,000) of
affymetrix microarray users in the industry, in the US, Candada, UK,
France, and Swtizerland. Users in academia are relatively easy to
find, but researchers within companies do not publish as extensively.
The ideal would be the Affymetrix client list, but, obviously, it's
not easy to come by. Minimum information necessary is the name of the
individual, job title, and organization.

What is needed here, is a METHOD which can be easily implemented by
people who have relatively little knowledge of the technologies and
the industry. It is alright if it is somewhat labor-intensive, but the
end result needs to be a list of at least 1,000 affymetrix microarray
users in the life sciences (pharma, biotech, etc.) industry.

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Request for Question Clarification by pafalafa-ga on 06 Nov 2005 20:12 PST

looshkie-ga,

For starters, it would be helpful to have a precise understanding of
what product you're interested in...the phrase "affymetrix microarray"
can apparently refer to several things.

Can you give us a fuller description, or better yet, a link to the product page.

Thanks,

pafalafa-ga

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Clarification of Question by looshkie-ga on 08 Nov 2005 01:19 PST

In this instance, we are referring to Affymetrix microarrays /
genechips used for gene expression profiling. These tools are used for
Expression Analysis (see bottom half of
http://www.affymetrix.com/products/arrays/index.affx) and NOT DNA
analysis (see top half of page).

The following example products [in pull down menu] ARE relevant:
http://www.affymetrix.com/products/application/quantitation.affx

The following example products [in pull down menu] are NOT relevant:
http://www.affymetrix.com/products/application/whole_genome.affx
http://www.affymetrix.com/products/application/targeted_genotyping.affx
http://www.affymetrix.com/products/application/sequence_analysis.affx

Applications of this technology include:
- pharmacogenomics
- toxicogenomics
- metabolomics
- nutrigenomics
- transcriptomics

Hope this helps!

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Request for Question Clarification by pafalafa-ga on 08 Nov 2005 02:40 PST

looshkie-ga,

Thanks for clarifying what you're after, here.

For starters, please have a look at the following link, and let me
know what you think of the results:


://www.google.com/search?sourceid=navclient&ie=UTF-8&rls=GGLD,GGLD:2005-04,GGLD:en&q=affymetrix+%22genome+array+OR+arrays%22+OR+%22expression+analysis%22+contact++site%3Aedu+



This was an effort to construct a search that would identify
Affymetrix expression analysis users at universities (I can focus on
the corporate side later on).

Are these results useful to you?  

As you suspected, there would be a good amount of labor involved to
visit each site and extract the organization and the contact person's
name...for the most part, though, the information is easily available
on most of the sites I spot-checked.

Of course, you could also get other contact information such as email
address -- I noticed that title is not often available.  Presumably,
you have the person-power at your end to undertake this task.


Take a look, and let me know how close (or how far!) this is from
meeting your needs.

With some additional feedback, it may be possible to refine a search
protocol and a method to get you your list.

pafalafa-ga

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Clarification of Question by looshkie-ga on 08 Nov 2005 04:00 PST

Dear pafalafa, 

Thank you for your interest in the question. I would like to clarify
that we have already done a fair amount of looking into solving this,
and have found several sources for finding the academic users. The
most useful of them were some intelligently constructed google
searches which lead to the micorarray SIG at the NIH and directories
of genetics researchers. This yielded fairly large numbers of
academics of whom a certain percentage is engaged in expression
analysis. The real target, however, are the users in the industry. At
this point even a list of companies we KNOW are engaged in expression
analysis using the Affymetrix microarray would be of great help.

We do have a lot of manpower available to sift through raw data, but
the protocols for doing it have to be very clearly articulated.

Another constraint is that we will not use any legally or ethically
questionable ways of obtaining the information, such as the one
suggested in a comment by awsomeo3000.

I'm still waiting for Google to start accepting applications to become
a researcher, but in the mean time:

The illegal way to do it would be to advertise Affymetrix Microarrays
at a price lower than market and see who gets in touch with you. 
Since that would constitute false advertising, I cannot recommend it.

The next best thing is to put together some group buys of Affymetrix
Microarrays.  Get in touch with distributors of the product and ask
what kind of volume discounts you can get for a large purchase.  One
of these distributors should be able to give you a schedule of prices
at various unit counts.  Get on some web forums related to
biotechnology and making posts that you are putting together the group
and post the schedule of pricing.  You may be able to get the
distributor to commit to the pricing schedule merely by committing to
furnish the list of names, shipping addresses, and units per address. 
Hopefully, the distributor will just want to set everybody up as an
accounts recieveable.  If the distributor doesn't want to take the
risk that some people balk out, you get every body to escrow their
respective amount using i-escrow or one of these services.  Get them
the information for using the escrow or even set up their accounts if
you have to.  Just to make it as easy as possible for the group
members to participate, so that you get more people to join the group.
 In the process, you have created a verified list of users.

The distributor idea is a dead end since Affymetrix does all their own
manufacture and distribution.

I can tell you that absolutely EVERY pharmaceutical company is using
some form of micro array at this point.  As a former researcher at
then Pharmacia and Upjohn I can tell you we were going through
Affymetrix GeneChip microarrays like water.  Most companies use them
for novel compound biologic activity screening.

Basically you can profile the biologic activity of all known drug
compounds by the effect on genomic regulation and then take any
compound the chemists manage to create and run it on a GeneChip and
see if it matches a pattern suggestive of a known compound that might
suggest similar activity.  Obviously this is a pretty broad screen,
but even with this we were running thousands of compounds.  This
doesn't even include direct profiling of specific pathways and a
miriad of more focused uses that are being implemented.

You can pretty much bet that every other pharmaceutical company is
doing something similar with some form of microarray.

As far as names... they aren't going to be published by any
corporation and employees are locked under about a dozen proprietary
information agreements. (including me and why I can't be more specific
than above and can not give names of anyone using them where I
worked).  What is more, when ordering them, all orders for all
equipment tends to go through a central purchasing to further isolate
the individual order from any info on its final destination.

Finding out who is specifically ordering them would, literally,
require something on the order of industrial grade espionage.  I would
assume that most biotech firms would be equally as guarded unless they
have federa/state/educational grant support that would require
disclosure.

You might be able to pick some spin-off biotech ventures if you search
for corporations linked to educational institution based researchers
that resulted from published studies utilizing the technology
(cumbersome).

Good Luck

I did some simple search in the European Patent database. I searched
for keyword microarray and I got about 1500 patents as a result. Next,
I searched few of them an found one that in the Description part has
mentioned Affymetrix. So if you do it with other patents, maybe also
searching with using other keywords that could relate to microarray
business, you can obtain names of companies that were involved in the
patent and probably are using the Affymetrix technology.
Hope it helps

XYS

Why dont you post an ad in the usual trade magazines for each of the
industry listed or use a call center? Sounds like you have a competing
product in the works.