Proteomics firm Gentel Biosciences and Van Andel Research Institute said this week that they've been granted a US patent covering a technique for profiling changes in the glycosylation of proteins captured on an antibody array slide.
The patent, number 7,838,634, covers a "high-throughput method of screening for a biomarker indicative of a disease" and includes "methods utilizing a microarray to measure the glycan level of a protein."
Comprising roughly 80 percent of the protein biomarkers currently in clinical use, glycoproteins are a significant area of focus for biomarker research, and, VARI researcher Brian Haab said in a statement, "the ability to efficiently screen glycosylated variants of many proteins for use as biomarkers offers an unprecedented opportunity for discoveries of new glycan-based biomarkers."
Gentel owns exclusive rights to the technology through a licensing agreement it signed with VARI in 2006. It now plans to combine the glycan detection technology with more than 50 of its SilverQuant Antibody Array kits, which use chromogenic reagents for the detection of target proteins.
A patent for the technology is also pending in the European Union.