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Nanoscopic Bead Tech Speeds Drug Development July 16, 2010
New research confirms that a revolutionary technology developed at Wake Forest Univ. will slash years off the time it takes to develop drugs—bringing vital new treatments to patients much more quickly.
Lab-on-Bead uses tiny beads studded with “pins” that match a drug to a disease marker in a single step, allowing researchers to test an infinite number of possibilities for treatments all at once. When Lab-on-Bead makes a match, it has found a viable treatment for a specific disease – speeding up drug discovery by as much as 10,000 times and cutting out years of testing and re-testing in the laboratory.
“It helps the most interesting new drugs work together to stick their heads up above the crowd,” says Jed C. Macosko, primary inventor of the Lab-on-Bead technology. “Each type of drug has its own molecular barcode. Then, with the help of matching DNA barcodes on each nanoscopic bead, all the drugs of a certain type find their own ‘home’ bead and work together to make themselves known in our drug discovery process.”
Macosko and Martin Guthold, the co-inventor of Lab-on-Bead, will work with the biotechnology startup NanoMedica Inc. to test how drug companies will use the new tool. The company has relocated to Winston-Salem from New Jersey; Macosko serves as the chief innovation officer while Guthold is the chief science officer. NanoMedica Inc. has one year to bring the new technology to the market, or relinquish the rights to the patent.
Lab-on-Bead screens millions of chemicals simultaneously using plastic beads so small that 1,000 of them would fit across a human hair. Pharmaceutical companies could use the technology to identify treatments and diagnostics for conditions ranging from cancer to Alzheimers.
One of the targets the research team has focused on is a breast cancer cell called HER2.
“We want to find a molecule that detects that cancer cell,” Guthold says. “In that circumstance, you could use Lab-on-Bead as a diagnostic tool.”
“There are an infinite number of possibilities for combining carbon, nitrogen, hydrogen and other elements into different shapes that interact differently in the cells,” Macosko says. “Those shapes could block cancer – they could block all kinds of things. If there’s some cure to a disease or way to diagnose it, we’re going to find it faster.”
The Journal of Molecular Recognition is the peer-reviewed publication of the International Society of Molecular Recognition. The Lab-on-Bead study will be in the September/October issue; it appears online in advance of publication.
Source: Wake Forest Univ.
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