Phage Display Tools for Automated Blood Typing

描述(由申请人提供)：目前血库中使用的技术是非常劳动密集型的，容易出现人为错误，而且每次测试的成本比其他临床实验室的高一个数量级。再加上熟练的医疗技术人员的日益短缺，人类血浆衍生的表型试剂供应的减少，以及基于凝集的方法完全自动化的固有困难，以具有成本效益的方式进行快速和准确的输血前检测的能力已成为一个重大挑战。长期目标是使用一系列新的分子技术来开发一种新型的可再生、廉价、高质量的血库检测试剂，这种试剂将在快速、高通量、自动化的检测系统中发挥作用。这项拟议技术的核心是展示在噬菌体颗粒表面的红细胞抗原特异性单抗。研究人员建议利用颗粒中自然存在的独特DNA序列来开发一种测试系统，在该系统中，通过分析检测试剂的基因来确定细胞的表型。这种策略将提供非凡的灵敏度和特异度，将需要极少量的测试材料和试剂，将很容易适应自动化，并将服从于多路策略，提供在单个反应容器中同时进行红细胞样本抗原分析的可能性。

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): Current technologies used in blood banking are extraordinarily labor intensive, prone to human error, and an order of magnitude more expensive per test that those in other clinical laboratories. Coupled with a growing shortage of skilled medical technologists, dwindling supplies of human plasma-derived phenotyping reagents, and an inherent difficulty in fully automating agglutination-based methodologies, the ability to perform rapid and accurate pre-transfusing testing in a cost-effective manner has become a significant challenge. The long-term objective is to use a set of novel molecular technologies to develop a new class of renewable, inexpensive, high-quality blood bank testing reagents that will function in a rapid, high-throughput, automatable assay system. At the core of the proposed technology are red blood cell antigen-specific monoclonal antibodies displayed on the surface of bacteriophage particles. The investigators propose to exploit the naturally-occurring presence of unique DNA sequences within the particles to develop an assay system in which the phenotype of a cell is determined by assaying the genotype of the detecting reagent. Such a strategy will offer extraordinary sensitivity and specificity, will require minute amounts of testing materials and reagents, will be easily adapted to automation, and will be amenable to multiplexing strategies offering the possibility of simultaneous antigen profiling of a red cell sample in a single reaction vessel.