MPD^TM Enhanced Pharmacokinetics

There is an increasing use of animal models in biology and the mouse is becoming a favorite model animal due to the large number of well defined lines of mice, for which the genotype and the phenotype are relatively well understood. These include a number of "knock-out" mice. Because the mouse is a small animal, there is an increasing need for more sensitive detection methods permitting high resolution pharmacokinetics studies without sacrificing the animals. We demonstrated MPD enhanced pharmacokinetics studies (PK/MPD), which showed the considerable advantages of our supersensitive MPD instrumentation. As only 10-20 microliters of blood is required, the animals do not need to be sacrificed.

MPD^TM Enhanced Immunodiagnostics

BioTraces has developed a significant new assay protocol, the MPD enhanced immunoassay(IA/MPD), which provides quantitative measurement of biological substances at levels as low as a femtogram/ml. Unprecedented sensitivity of SIRMAs for interleukins (IL-1 beta, IL-4, IL-6, IL-10, IL-11 and IL-12), p24 HIV antigen and human tropic hormones (TSH, LH, FSH and hCG) have been documented. Coupling MPD technology to an sandwich immunoassay has resulted in the development of a new class of ultra-sensitive immunoassay. Because of the extraordinary sensitivity of the MPD instrument, it has been possible to improve the sandwich immunoassay format. Specialized blocking and assay reagents have been developed to reduce nonspecific biological background (NSBB). The collective techniques used to optimize the IA/MPD, typically result in up to 500-fold greater sensitivity than a classical IRMA or ELISA. The MPD enhanced immunoassays have been developed in the convenient 96-well microtiter plate format.

MPD^TM Enhanced Nucleic Acid Diagnostics

We developed a family of DNA/RNA diagnostic assays satisfying the needs for the earliest possible detection and reliable quantitation. The use of MPD permits the most sensitive and reproducible detection and quantitation of HIV-1 in patient samples. Our early detection HIV-1 nucleic acid assays, based on coupling MPD with the polymerase chain reaction (PCR), have demonstrated excellent signal to noise ratio at the level of a few copies of HIV-1 proviral DNA per milliliter of serum. Also,extremely sensitive quantitative PCR for Cytomegalovirus (CMV),Respiratory Scinticia Virus (RSV),Salmonella, E. coli and kanamycine resistance gene have been developed. For all these targets qPCR/MPD shows good reliability for quantitation of a few copies of target DNA. Excellent linearity, from a few copies to a few thousand copies, was demonstrated. We also developed the MPD enhanced quantitative RT-PCR/MPD for PSMA mRNA. The qPCR/MPD and qRT-PCR/MPD protocoles have been developed in the convenient 96-well microtiter plate format and will be availabel at the end of 1999 in 384 wells format. Future assay development is focused on the extension of the qPCR/MPD line of products and on MPD enabled direct quantitation of nucleic acids (dqDNA/MPD and dqRNA/MPD).

Analysis of 2-D electrophoretic gels ( Data Access )

We have implemented a powerful wavelet transformation software package. Parallel computational methods are used. They permit the implementation of a very efficient wavelet analysis software package, which is very useful in the analysis of 2-D gel images. We demonstrated that our wavelet software is much more efficient and faster than classical software packages. A considerable improvement in the sensitivity of 2-D gels has been achieved.

For additional information about servicies provided by BioTraces please contact:
Dr. A.K.Drukier, 703-7931550 x 108 e-mail: akd@biotraces.com