FREMONT, Calif., May 7 /PRNewswire/ -- Ciphergen Biosystems, Inc. (Nasdaq: CIPH - news) announced today that the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) had issued U.S. Patent No. 6,225,047, directed to a novel protein expression profiling method for protein biomarker discovery. The method, invented at Ciphergen, called ``Differential Retentate Chromatography,'' is an advanced form of SELDI (surface enhanced laser desorption/ionization) time-of-flight mass spectrometry. Differential Retentate Chromatography enables the discovery of multiple protein biomarkers useful in predictive medicine, including disease diagnosis, toxicology assessment, clinical trial stratification, and drug target identification and validation. The power of the method lies in its ability to provide high resolution fingerprinting of differentially expressed proteins in biological samples and rapidly validate the findings in a population study.
``We are delighted that the USPTO has acknowledged Differential Retentate Chromatography with a United States patent,'' said William E. Rich, President and CEO of Ciphergen. ``Clients of Ciphergen's Biomarker Discovery Centers(TM) and purchasers of our ProteinChip® System are already using this powerful protein expression profiling method to discover and validate new protein biomarkers. This patent secures Ciphergen's exclusive right to the Differential Retentate Chromatography technology and, we believe, further enables our leadership in the field of clinical proteomics.''
In the Differential Retentate Chromatography method of protein expression profiling, proteins from different biological samples are captured on a variety of chromatographic or affinity based biochip surfaces. The captured proteins are quantitatively detected directly ``on-chip'' by SELDI-time-of-flight mass spectrometry and compared in order to identify proteins that are present in different amounts in the samples. Proteins that are differentially present in two or more samples are candidate biomarkers for disease, toxicology or drug-responder status or may indicate pathway information.
``Many of Ciphergen's collaborators and customers, using this Differential Retentate Chromatography-based protein expression profiling method, have discovered multiple protein biomarkers in several different cancers, neurological disorders and other diseases,'' said Rich. ``Further, several clinical studies have been recently reported at the American Association of Cancer Research meeting in New Orleans and published in the American Journal of Pathology showing that the use of multi-biomarkers in combination with advanced pattern recognition software can significantly increase the statistical confidence of a clinical diagnosis of disease. We believe that multi-biomarker strategies will yield significant advances in clinical diagnostics, including early detection of cancer. Ciphergen's future plans include marketing of clinical diagnostic systems and assays involving multi-biomarkers discovered using Differential Retentate Chromatography.''... |
