Multi-Wavelength Fluorescence Radical Dosimetry for Real-Time Assessment of Protein Footprinting Radical Yield

The GenNext Phase I SBIR submssion entitled “Multi-Wavelength Fluorescence Radical Dosimetry for Real-Time Assessment of Protein Footprinting Radical Yield” is responsive to the ackowledged need for new and improved tools for higher order structural analysis (HOS) of biopharmaceuticals and membrane protein target studies. An emerging HOS analysis technique is hydroxyl radical foot-printing (HRPF). HRPF involves the irreversible labeling of a protein’s exterior by reaction with hydroxyl radicals with subsequent MS analysis to identify the outer portions of the protein. We have developed commercial solutions to perform HRPF. Recently a new and valuable footprinting technique that relies upon trifluoromethyl (TFM) radicals created by OH radical attack of aqueous sodium triflinate has been developed that shows great promise when combined with HRPF. TFM protein footprinting (TFMPF) is highly complementary to HRPF, as TFMPF effectively labels amino acid residues that are relatively “silent” to OH radical attack. When used together, HRPF and TFMPF provide substantial coverage and detection of solvent accessible residues, and as such represent a transformative improvement to biopharmaceutical HOS assessment.The practice of TFMPF has been pioneered by Professor Michael Gross of Washington University, St. Louis, Mo. While showing great promise to address unmet challenges in pharmaceutical research, reproducibility for TFMPF is challenged by variability of background scavenging. Collaborating with the Gross laboratory, our work will extend our innovative HRPF radical dosimetry technology to TFMPF. GenNext Technologies is the only company commercializing products for HRPF HOS analysis. Our goal is to convert the combined use of HRPF and TFMPF process from an academic research experiment into a valuable analytical tool. Once simplified and transformed into a robust technique, we envision the facile combination of HRPF and TFMPF to enable: paratope and epitope the interaction of mAb biopharmaceuticals with their membrane targets; elucidate the dynamics of lead binding to orthosteric or allosteric membrane targets; to reveal secondary messenger signaling cascades of GPCR lead compounds; and to detect the impact of orthosteric / allosteric anti- neoplastics upon targets such as kinases and growth factors.The importance of biopharmaceuticals and membrane protein targets has created a need for improved analytics to facilitate biopharmaceutical research. Our Phase I SBIR proposal will create an improved means to study the higher order structure of bipharmaceuticals and their intended druggable targets in the context of facilitating proteomics and pharmaceutical research and development. Upon successful completion of our program, we will demonstrate the transformative nature of our new technology to positively impact biopharmaceutical research.