Getting "Excited" About New Deal with the University of Manchester
30 November 2009
Link Technologies secures exclusive license for ultra sensitive diagnostic probes.
We are pleased to announce today an exclusive license deal with The University of Manchester Intellectual Property Limited (UMIP). Under the terms of the license for the University's "exciplex" technology, Link will manufacture and sell highly sensitive exciplex-based diagnostic reagents worldwide. Exciplex technology offers ultra-biospecificity and significantly increased detection sensitivity over conventional systems due to negligible background signal. This license marks the start of a forward collaboration between Link and the University to develop the existing technology.
Honorary Professor Ken Douglas and Dr Elena Bichenkova, a Senior Lecturer in Medicinal Chemistry at the University of Manchester, have developed new exciplex diagnostic probes based on labelling oligonucleotides with exciplex partners that form excited-state complexes in close spatial proximity. Application of these modified oligonucleotides in diagnostic systems has been shown to discriminate DNA mutations at the level of PCR products and plasmid DNA. Professor Douglas commented: "This is a very exciting opportunity to bring together a University discovery base and this excellent company. The exciplex is a significant new area of science and we are pleased to have the expertise of Link Technologies to take this forward commercially for clinical benefit".
Dr John Bremner, Business Development Director at Link Technologies, concurred: "We are delighted with this deal, which we firmly believe is the start of something truly exciting. Our ongoing collaboration with the University over the coming months will optimise the technology, allowing Link to launch a new range of innovative products targeted at diagnostic companies worldwide."
Patents for this technology, covering all major market areas, are held by the University of Manchester and licensed to Link. Link Technologies has also secured the rights to any intellectual property arising from the collaboration with the University. No financial details of the agreement have been disclosed.
About the Exciplex Technology
Detection of DNA by fluorescent labels is now in very widespread use in many areas. One of the challenges of fluorescent systems is to reduce the background fluorescent signal to improve the signal-to-noise of the assay. This technology uses the formation of exciplexes to address this problem.
Exciplexes are formed when an aromatic exciplex partner is excited by light. If there is another exciplex partner very close by then an excited-state complex (an exciplex) is formed which emits light as fluorescence at a characteristic longer wavelength. The formation of this excited-state complex is very highly distance dependant so that no fluorescence at all can be monitored at detection wavelength unless the strict geometric constraint is obeyed, thus giving an inherent bio-specificity. This same distance dependence makes probes based on this technology very sensitive to mismatches meaning that these probes are ideally suited to SNP detection. The distance dependence is over a much shorter distance than FRET, thus making the exciplex probe technology potentially more bio-specific (and thus more reliable) than other fluorescent technologies.
As the isolated parts of the exciplex detector have no inherent signal at the detection wavelength, this approach has no background signal and thus benefit from excellent signal-to-noise ratio.
In addition, the fluorescence colour of the exciplex system assembled by bio-target (green fluorescence) is visibly different to that of the individual components (blue fluorescence), which offers the opportunity for direct visualization approaches.
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