NEW METHOD FOR PROTEIN CHIPS

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It is increasingly important to develop the new techniques which permit to assess bioactive molecules and to monitor the metabolic status and cellular response to external stimulation. The concurrent quantification for a large number of targets is a major advantage of the proposed super-sensitive, dedicated protein chip concept. We note, that by use of aptamers,( i.e., nucleic acid constructs), a transfer of technology from the fast developing microarrays of DNA oligonucleotides to proteins chip is accomplished. The combination of MPD instrumentation ("sensitivity") and aptamers ("specificity") may revolutionize immunodiagnostics and protein quantification. Thus, BioTraces and NeXstar have initiated a joint effort towards the improved detection and quantitation of proteins, viruses and bacteria. The goal of this project is to test MPD/Aptamer enhanced methods for detection of cytokine targets and compare their performance with prior-art techniques. PROPOSED COMMERCIAL APPLICATIONS: The wide range of applications for MPD includes immunoassays and RNA/DNA analysis. Using MPD enhanced techniques, traces of biological molecules can be quantified at much lower concentrations. Some of the most important applications of MPD are in immunoassays, quantitative PCR and direct detection of DNA at the few copies level. These markets are predicted to be about $5 billion/year by 2000. MPD may account for a few percent of this market.