Lighting up Nanotechnology
Published in M2 PressWIRE on Tuesday, 31 October 2006 at 16:21 GMT
Copyright (C) 2006, M2 Communications Ltd.
Lumera (NASDAQ:LMRA) lights the way in the development of polymer materials and products based on those materials for use in wireless and optical communications networks and in biochemical analysis. Lumera develops custom electro-optic devices for the US government, particularly the Department of Defense, which accounts for nearly all of sales. Products in development include compact panel wireless antennas (AccuPath), disposable biochips used to isolate DNA and protein samples for testing (NanoCapture), and electro-optic modulators and optical interconnects for use in telecommunications applications.
Shares were up 13% since Harvard Medical School researchers started using Lumera's ProteomicProcessor Biosensor.
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Lumera Corporation, an emerging leader in the field of nanotechnology, announced that Harvard Medical School researchers are now building next generation discovery and diagnostics methods with Lumera's ProteomicProcessor(TM) Biosensor.
During the past year, Lumera has placed four beta units with highly respected, world renowned research organizations to demonstrate and establish new applications that take advantage of the instrument's unprecedented throughput in a label-free format. Harvard has served as a beta site for Lumera's biosensor platform, the ProteomicProcessor(TM), since mid-2006. The Harvard collaboration is focused on integrating their NAPPA (Nucleic Acid Programmable Protein Array) technology, which provides a simple and cost-effective way to generate a protein biochip, with the ProteomicProcessor(TM) to read and analyze the biochip.
"In the past quarter, we have successfully narrowed the window of processing conditions to produce a ProteomicProcessor(TM) 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. Kinases are a class of proteins which are known to signal certain illnesses, including some cancers, to the "on" or diseased state. Kinase inhibitors effectively can turn the "on" signal to an "off" state. Interest in this area has been propelled by the success of Gleevec, a multibillion drug from Novartis which was the first approved drug to directly turn off the signal of a protein known to cause a cancer.
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Release date: 31 Oct 2006
