NEW YORK (GenomeWeb News) – MorphoSys subsidiary AbD Serotec said today that it is collaborating with e2v Biosensors to develop a new protein-quantification system for point-of-care and near-patient testing.
The agreement builds on an initial project that the companies began in 2006 to use AbD’s HuCAL GOLD recombinant antibody technology with e2v’s Visucare single-antibody immunoassay technology.
AbD said it has since generated a series of recombinant antibodies that e2v could use to perform feasibility studies for the Visucare technology.
The e2v technology is based on surface enhanced resonance Raman spectroscopy, or SERRS, an electromagnetic surface-sensitive technique that can detect single molecules binding to a silver surface.
The Visucare platform comprises a HuCAL-based antibody, a reporter SERRS dye linked to peptide, and a silver surface supporting the electromagnetic field. The antibody is immobilized on a silver surface and the SERRS dye peptide is bound to the HuCAL antibody and held outside the electromagnetic field. In the presence of a protein biomarker, the SERRS dye peptide is displaced, binds to the silver surface within the electromagnetic field, and gives off a signal.
According to e2v, Visucare does not need an antibody pair to detect a biomarker, which eliminates the washing and incubation steps that are necessary with other systems and also enables the detection of biomarkers “inaccessible to other systems and at very low levels of detection.”
The companies are currently developing a cardiac point of care panel, as well as “other unique biomarker applications,” e2v Biosensors’ CEO, Paul Rodgers, said in a statement.
Rogers added that the company is seeking strategic partners to help commercialize the Visucare platform in “a broad range of point-of-care and pathology applications.”