The World's Largest Human Proteome Microarray: Advancing Protein Biomarker Discovery

Proteomics Research and Development company, CDI Laboratories, has created glass slide substrates printed with recombinant human proteins comprising 81% of the human proteome for high-throughput analytics, contract research and hybridoma development services.  

CDI is a privately-owned biotechnology business focusing on protein and antibody microarray design, production and custom assay services. CDI's flagship product — HuProt™ — is the most comprehensive human proteome microarray in the industry, allowing 23,000 protein interactions to be studied in parallel. 

CDI’s mission is to advance protein biomarker discovery and rapidly translate these discoveries into cost-effective clinical tools and diagnostics, thereby enabling precise and early clinical decision-making for numerous diseases such as cancer, neurological diseases, and, autoimmune-related diseases.  

The laboratory currently has patents in process across several related technologies to increase high-throughput analysis of protein-protein interactions, antibodies, and biomarker identification processes.

CDI’s content of 81% of the human proteome (>23,000 proteins) allows for unprecedented ability to delve into immune-related biomarkers of disease and immuno-oncology. As well as providing an aid for the development of the most precise antibodies by testing for possible cross-reactivity with other target proteins.

Recently CDI’s HuProt arrays and services were highlighted in a poster at the 2017 ASCO Annual Meeting in Chicago.  In this study, New York University investigator Prof. Iman Osman and CDI collaborated on a study that could lead to a method of prognostically determining patient suitability for immune checkpoint inhibitor therapy.  

This type of therapy has been shown to be a highly valuable tool in the fight against many forms of cancer.  The biological drugs used (monoclonal antibodies) help activate the patient's innate immune system to enable the patient to destroy cancer cells. 

However, a substantial proportion of patients receiving immune checkpoint inhibitors develop immune-related adverse events (irAEs). IrAEs are a critical obstacle to realizing the full potential of immune checkpoint inhibitor therapy, as they can necessitate systemic immunosuppression therapy and/or treatment termination.  Therefore, a test to identify which patients could suffer from this adverse effect would be an important tool for these types of treatments.

Seromic immune-related (autoantibody) biomarkers are robust and can quickly be translated to assays that can drive individual patient treatments.  Proteomic-based biomarkers reflect what is currently going on, unlike DNA-based biomarkers which could piont to an event that may or may not be happening at that moment in time.  In addition, serum collection is done at most doctor visits and is a non-invasive and routine part of patient care.

The HuProt microarray generates massive binding profiles in days, not months, and can be used in several key developmental areas, such as:

• Serum (biomarker) profiling- disease diagnosis, prognosis; cancer immunotherapy, vaccine development 

• Protein binding assays- small molecule binding, DNA/RNA binding, enzyme binding specificity, etc.

• Antibody specificity testing- assess cross-reactivity, identify highest quality research reagents

Last year, CDI purchased an Arrayjet Ultra Marathon II robotic bioprinter for its microarray manufacture. This high-capacity instrument offers significant performance advantages over contact print methods, including significant reductions in lot-to-lot variability and inter-assay variability. This high-throughput microarray printer enables CDI Laboratories to perform efficient analyses of thousands of protein interactions, using minimal amounts of valuable research or clinical samples.

Using this technology,CDI are able to print the 23,000 human proteins in duplicate on one chip, a feat that requires the utmost precision and quality regarding spot morphology. Additionally, since the proteins are purified and printed to retain the proteins’ native conformation, the ability of the printer to maintain consistency in rigorous environments is vital. Arrayjet has increased CDI’s capacity for printing large quantities of protein microarrays, 1000 slides in a single batch, whilst also significantly improving quality. 

CDI Laboratories recently announced that it has added >1,000 new recombinant proteins to its HuProt - human proteome microarray. And now, with 81% of the human proteome available in a powerful and economical analytical platform, the company has further strengthened its position as a global leader in microarray production, content and application development.

The most recent version of HuProt launched earlier this summer at ASCO 2017 reflects CDI’s ongoing strategy to continually add proteins to meet its goal of having the entire human proteome on a single slide.  

Furthermore, the new proteins added to the latest generation represent finer coverage of proteins involved in autoimmune-related toxicities and conditions, transcription factor binding, and signal transduction pathways. 

Since CDI Laboratories provides analysis across academia and the pharmaceutical industry in areas such as autoimmune research, cancer biomarkers, cancer biological therapeutic research and vaccine production, strong R&D and the optimum tools are essential in providing the best possible service, as Scott D. Paschke, Vice President of CDI Laboratories explains:

“The CDI mission is to empower research and development in proteomics with proprietary technologies. We create tools that help accelerate research by designing products and services to improve investigations around proteomics. 

The printing technology we are using is certainly cutting edge and we expect it to significantly improve our capacity and quality. It was chosen because of its ability to print large numbers of high quality arrays with the least amount of quality control problems. Moreover, this will significantly improve CDI’s manufacturing capabilities.”

HuProt microarrays are available for purchase by labs with in-house microarray scanning capability. Alternatively, CDI's Discovery Services division offers contract assay design, research, bioinformatics and custom-configured microarray production on a per-project basis.