Expedited High-Affinity Ligand Generation from Biomarker Sequence by Integration of Data Mining with High-throughput Screening

Frontline and support military personnel often may be exposed to toxic industrial, biological, or chemical agents. These typically elicit a biochemical reaction resulting in the release of protein biomarkers that are measurable in the blood or urine. Sensitive and specific identification of these biomarkers could facilitate timely intervention, potentially mitigating decreased operational efficiency and preventing long term health issues. Existing methods, such as generating antibodies for ELISA-based detection, computational design through ligand docking, or high-throughput screening of vast ligand databases are highly time intensive and not always successful. There is an unfulfilled niche for a technology for rapidly (1-2 weeks) generating high-affinity ligands for newly identified biomarkers, based only on their primary sequence, which could be used to detect and quantify them in a complex mixture of other proteins. Owing to the evolutionary design of proteins, it is documented that “similar proteins bind similar ligands”. Lynntech, Inc., in collaboration with Dr. Garner at UTSWMED, proposes the utilization of database mining techniques to obtain knowledge based ligands, which, in conjunction with iterative high-throughput screening using patented, automated, chip-based peptide/peptoid/DNA micro-array production and detection technology, may be used to generate specific high affinity ligands for protein biomarkers.