Enabling Nanomembrane-Based Biomolecule and Nanoparticle Separations

DESCRIPTION provided by applicant The global market for nanoparticles NP in biotechnology drug development and drug delivery was estimated to be $ B for and is expected to reach more than $ B by The two most active areas of product development are NPs for drug delivery and for in vivo imaging In these applications it is often critical that he outer surfaces of NPs are functionalized with antibodies Ab that target them to speci c tissues After functionalizing NPs with Abs it is necessary to remove unbound Ab from the NP preparation because any free Ab will compete with the NPs for target tissues Given the similar sizes of Ab nm and NPs this ubiquitous clean up step is challenging and represents a current pain in the market place Both academic and industrial NP scientists report that existing polymer based membranes are not capable of performing this separation and that they must resort to more time consuming complex and lower yield techniques such as size exclusion chromatography or dialysis Membrane based methods are preferred because of their simplicity ef ciency and scalability In this proposal we will realize a near term straight forward produc development opportunity that will result in a solution to the NP Ab separation problem Using SiMPoreandapos s nanomembranes in a custom centrifuge con guration we have recently shown the ability to separate Ab from nm polystyrene particles Additional innovations in membrane fabrication and non fouling coatings will allow us to pursue the following goals to develop and evaluate a SiMPore product prototype based on our preliminary custom centrifuge concept to produce a suf cient number of prototypes to enable beta testing at two major life science tool suppliers and to introduce a validated product upon completion of this month Phase I project PUBLIC HEALTH RELEVANCE This proposal focuses on developing laboratory tools for removing antibodies from nano particle conjugations Antibody conjugated nano particles are useful for both research and diagnostic purposes Our tools will help increase the specificity of these preparations