Antibody Surrogates Are Just A 'Click' Away, Caltech Chemists Say

Chemists at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) and the Scripps Research Institute have developed an innovative technique to create cheap but highly stable chemicals that have the potential to take the place of the antibodies used in many standard medical diagnostic tests. 

James R. Heath, the Elizabeth W. Gilloon Professor and professor of chemistry, along with K. Barry Sharpless, the W. M. Keck Professor of Chemistry at the Scripps Research Institute and winner of the 2001 Nobel Prize in Chemistry, and their colleagues, describe the new technique in the latest issue of Angewandte Chemie, the leading European journal of chemistry. 

Last year, Heath and his colleagues announced the development of the Integrated Blood-Barcode Chip, a diagnostic medical device, about the size of a microscope slide, which can separate and analyze dozens of proteins using just a pinprick of blood. The barcode chip employed antibodies, proteins utilized by the immune system to identify, bind to, and remove particular foreign compounds, such as bacteria and viruses - or other proteins.