Patents Issued for Biomarker Discovery

The growing portfolio of U.S. patents issued to Nanogen, Inc. (San Diego, CA, USA; www.nanogen.com) now includes intellectual property related to novel biomarker discovery technology and methods of isolating nucleic acids on a microarray.

Two new patents were recently issued to the company. One relates to software designed for amino acid sequencing pattern matching and determining the number of possible sequences consistent with the molecular weight of the amino acid. This software is designed to provide a superior method for analyzing a large amount of data to identify unique amino acid sequences quickly, a key part of proteomic biomarker discovery. The software was developed by SynX Pharma, a subsidiary of Nanogen.

The second patent relates to methods using novel synthetic binding units (SBUs) with very high specificity and sensitivity, linked to nucleic acids as primers in a polymerase chain reaction (PCR) or other type of nucleic acid amplification and detection reaction. The SBUs only bind to a very specific complement SBU, which may be on a microarray chip. The SBU can act similarly to the commonly used biotin/strepavidin binding pair, but many different SBU pairs can be synthesized. Unique primers can be paired with unique SBUs so that upon detection on a microarray, the amplified products array themselves automatically to bind with a complementary SBU attached to the array.

"The technology that these patents cover can improve our ability to find appropriate biomarkers and can improve the use of multiplexing in diagnostics, helping us to bring valuable diagnostic solutions to the market,” noted Howard C. Birndorf, chairman and CEO of Nanogen. The company has used the amino acid matching technology to identify biomarkers of disease for future development as diagnostic products.




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