Los Alamos National Laboratory Completes Successful Analysis of Antibodies Using Lumera Corporation Technology
8:45 AM EST November 15, 2006
Lumera Corporation (Nasdaq:LMRA), an emerging leader in the field of nanotechnology, announced today that its proprietary Heterodimer Protein Technology (HPT) and ProteomicProcessor(TM) were both successfully used to analyze single chain antibodies from Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL).
"Lumera is pleased to work with Los Alamos National Laboratory," said Tom Mino, Lumera CEO. "Our Bioscience Business Unit channels our nanotechnology platform into developing useful tools for finding and speeding up the delivery of the next billion-dollar therapeutic drug. This work illustrates the versatility of the Lumera antibody discovery products, which we plan to offer next year to the drug discovery market."
"Currently, we are using e-coil tagged, single chain antibodies in a high throughput flow cytometry-based screening and characterization," said Peter Pavlik, project leader at Los Alamos. "Having access to Lumera's high throughput SPR-based characterization technology that uses the same coil chemistry would increase our ability to characterize antibodies in great detail."
"The extraordinary revenue growth rate of therapeutic antibodies is one of the most attractive in the pharmaceutical industry," said Ronald Dudek, Director of Business Development at Lumera Corporation. "The Lumera antibody discovery products will be the first of a suite of new products that present a total solution to our partners in the drug discovery market. We believe that applied nanotechnology solutions, like those we will offer, will increase the speed and efficiency of pharmaceutical drug discovery."
Los Alamos National Laboratory is a world leader in phage display technology, antibody engineering, and the development of high throughput screening assays. Phage display is an emerging technology for the production of very large and highly diverse antibody libraries. Antibodies are the human body's immune response to infection, which is typically caused by foreign substances or antigens. Scientists have found that antibodies have the capacity to bind specifically to antigens, thereby neutralizing the antigen. This ability is giving rise to a very large pharmaceutical market known as therapeutic antibodies. Rituxan, a highly successful billion-dollar commercial drug which treats non-Hodgkin's lymphoma, is an example of a therapeutic antibody drug.
The LANL single chain antibodies were engineered to contain the Lumera E-Coil peptide tag. The engineered antibodies were then screened using the Lumera NanoCapture(TM) K-Coil microarray slide and ProteomicProcessor(TM) instrument system.
About Lumera
Lumera is a leader in the emerging field of nanotechnology. The company designs proprietary molecular structures and polymer compounds for the bioscience and communications/computing industries, both of which represent large market opportunities. The company also has developed proprietary processes for fabricating such devices. For more information, please visit www.lumera.com.
About Los Alamos National Laboratory
Los Alamos National Laboratory is a multidisciplinary research institution engaged in strategic science on behalf of national security. The Laboratory is operated by a team composed of Bechtel National, the University of California, BWX Technologies, and Washington Group International for the Department of Energy's National Nuclear Security Administration. Los Alamos enhances national security by ensuring the safety and reliability of the U.S. nuclear stockpile, developing technologies to reduce threats from weapons of mass destruction, and solving problems related to energy, environment, infrastructure, health and global security concerns.
Certain statements contained in this release are forward-looking statements that involve a number of risks and uncertainties. Factors that could cause actual results to differ materially from those projected in the company's forward-looking statements include the following: market acceptance of our technologies and products; our ability to obtain financing; our financial and technical resources relative to those of our competitors; our ability to keep up with rapid technological change; government regulation of our technologies; our ability to enforce our intellectual property rights and protect our proprietary technologies; the ability to obtain additional contract awards and to develop partnership opportunities; the timing of commercial product launches; the ability to achieve key technical milestones in key products; and other risk factors identified from time to time in the company's SEC reports, including its Annual Report on Form 10-K, and its Quarterly Reports on Form 10-Q.
SOURCE: Lumera Corporation
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