>>FREMONT, Calif., Jan. 31 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ -- Ciphergen Biosystems, Inc. (Nasdaq: CIPH - news) announced today that it has developed a new generation prototype of ProteinChip® Arrays which are expected to have particular utility for drug discovery applications. Preliminary results were disclosed on January 25th at the Sanibel satellite meeting of the American Society of Mass Spectrometry. These new polymeric surfaces further extend Ciphergen's capabilities in Surface Enhanced Neat Desorption (SEND), a patented technology that Ciphergen has pioneered and continues to advance.
Ciphergen's new ProteinChip SEND surfaces are modified with homogenous polymeric coatings that interact with bursts of focused laser energy to allow the direct creation of ions, without introducing unacceptable levels of chemical noise, for analysis via Surface Enhanced Laser Desorption (SELDI) detection using Ciphergen's ProteinChip Systems. The elimination of the need to add chemical ``matrix'' solutions as a separate step, common to all Matrix Assisted Laser Desorption (MALDI) mass spectrometers, not only facilitates and simplifies research but also allows for better quantitation. Further, these SEND surfaces enable the analysis of small, low molecular weight molecules by reducing the chemical noise background otherwise created by matrix desorption. Polymeric blends containing both laser energy absorbing and functional binding groups are being developed to allow both on-chip chromatography as well as affinity immobilization of target molecules, such as receptors, which can then be screened against low molecular weight combinatorial drug candidates using this novel protein biochip approach.
``We're extremely excited about this recent technical advancement which further bolsters our position as the only company with commercially available protein biochips,'' commented William E. Rich, President and CEO of Ciphergen Biosystems. ``In addition to offering immediate advantages over conventional LC-MS and MALDI-TOF-MS systems, we believe that these new SEND ProteinChip Arrays are particularly exciting as they mark an important step toward creating a novel chemoproteomics-based drug discovery platform which could be used for on-chip small molecule screening.''<<
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Cheers, Tuck |
