HMS Researchers to Build Next Generation Discovery and Diagnostics Methods with Lumera’s ProteomicProcessor™ Biosensor

Lumera Corporation has announced that Harvard Medical School researchers are now building next generation discovery and diagnostics methods with Lumera’s ProteomicProcessor™ Biosensor.

During the past year, Lumera has placed four beta units with respected, world renowned research organizations to demonstrate and establish applications that take advantage of the instrument’s throughput in a label-free format.

Harvard has served as a beta site for Lumera’s biosensor platform, the ProteomicProcessor™, since mid-2006.

The Harvard collaboration is focused on integrating their NAPPA (Nucleic Acid Programmable Protein Array) technology, which provides way to generate a protein biochip, with the ProteomicProcessor™ to read and analyze the biochip.

"In the past quarter, we have successfully narrowed the window of processing conditions to produce a ProteomicProcessor™ compatible NAPPA array," said Dr. Joshua LaBaer, Director of the Harvard Institute of Proteomics.

"We now have a solid foundation on which to begin our development efforts."

"Among our first areas of investigation will be probing a family of 200 kinase proteins for their interaction with and among drug families relevant to cancer research."

"There is a significant amount of value to the pharmaceutical development market in combining these two technologies," said Dr. Timothy Londergan, Director of Lumera’s Bioscience Business.

"This will ultimately lead to new products that take advantage of NAPPA’s unique capability of producing proteins on demand and the ProteomicProcessor’s unique ability to understand in great detail how the proteins are interacting with each other and with other compounds, like, for example, drug candidates."

"We are particularly interested in using NAPPA to generate a human protein kinase array, allowing us to address a very large and growing segment of the drug discovery market with a high value consumable product."

According to Frost and Sullivan, the pharmaceutical industry spends nearly one third of its $50 billion of research and development dollars on kinase inhibitor therapeutics.