I-Corps: Plasma-based Protein Footprinting

I-Corps更广泛的影响/商业潜力将是加快基于蛋白质的治疗药物的开发，如抗体和生物仿制药。核心技术允许更快地确定这种蛋白质治疗剂的结构特征，这很重要，因为结构对蛋白质治疗剂的功能和效率都至关重要。该技术可以应用于治疗开发的许多阶段，从最初的发现和筛选阶段，到测试已开发的治疗在各种条件和环境下的稳定性，以达到质量控制的目的。考虑到蛋白质治疗药物在快速增长的生物制药市场中的重要份额，我们相信我们的技术将对该行业具有重要价值，并使未来治疗疾病的治疗药物能够更快地发展。这个I-Corps项目进一步开发了一种在液体环境中确定蛋白质结构特征的技术。这一发现意义重大，不仅因为蛋白质的结构决定了它的功能，通过了解蛋白质的结构，我们可以获得关于蛋白质本身的很多信息，还因为蛋白质本身存在于细胞内的液体环境中。等离子体被用来从蛋白质周围的水中产生反应性分子，通过测量蛋白质上被这个分子标记的区域，人们可以看到蛋白质的相关区域。当另一种元素的加入改变了蛋白质的结构，或者结合并掩盖了蛋白质的一面/面，这反映在反应分子修饰的水平或区域的变化上。通过这种方式，该技术可以快速绘制蛋白质结构变化。

The broader impact/commercial potential of this I-Corps will be to enable faster development of protein-based therapeutic drugs, such as antibodies and biosimilars. The core technology allows for faster determination of structural features of such protein therapeutic agents, which is important because structure is essential to both the function and efficiency of a protein therapeutic. The technology can be applied at many points within a therapeutic's development, from the initial discovery and screening phases to testing a developed therapeutic's stability under a wide array of conditions and environments for quality control purposes. Given the significant fraction of protein therapeutics, specifically, within the rapidly growing biopharmaceutical market, we believe our technology will both be of significant value to this industry and enable faster development of therapeutics for treating diseases in the future.This I-Corps project further develops a technology that determines structural features of proteins in a liquid environment. This is significant not only because a protein's structure dictates its function and by learning about the structure much information is gained about the protein itself, but also because proteins natively exist within cells in liquid environments. A plasma is used to create a reactive molecule from water surrounding the protein, and by measuring the areas on the protein that get labeled with this molecule, one can visualize relevant regions of the protein. When another element is added that changes the structure of the protein, or binds to and masks one side/face of the protein, this is reflected is changing levels or areas of modification by the reactive molecule. In this way, the technique can quickly map protein structural changes.