Two grants, totaling more than a million dollars, will help a St. Louis biotech startup in the CIC@CET develop and commercialize a gold-based nanoparticle that will help targeted proteins ‘light up’ better when researchers are looking for them in biological fluids. Meanwhile, the WUSTL professor behind the technology ALSO picked up funding to develop rapid Covid-19 detection.
Right now researchers can use systems like the Luminex xMAP, ELISA (enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay) and even a Western blot reader to look for antigens and proteins in blood or urine samples.
While these tools are great at looking at thousands of proteins at a time in a given sample, they are not particularly sensitive enough to detect the biomarkers they’re looking for if the sample doesn’t have it in high enough concentration.
Auragent Bioscience, LLC director of research and applications Scott Crick was not immediately available for comment, but according to published reports his company is commercializing “plasmonic fluor” technology being developed at Washington University, St. Louis by mechanical engineering professor Srikanth Singmaneni.
Plasmonic???? Yep, plasmonic.
A plasmonic effect is the interaction between electrons in metal nanoparticles and a ray of light that strikes a surface and is reflected away. Singmaneni pubilshed a paper in the journal ‘Nature’ in April of this year describing plasmonic fluor as a gold nanorod acting as a plasmonic antenna. The nanorod is coated in chemicals that light up when they encounter specific proteins. The light wavelength can be ‘tuned’ by modifying the size, shape and composition of the nanoprobe.
Grant 1: $299,578
The National Institute on Aging charges Auragent with optimizing and validating the use of their technology in an existing assay (Luminex xMAP) to significantly improve its detection sensitivity as it measures multiple inflammation-related biomarkers associated with aging and age-related diseases.
Grant 2: $776,276
The National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases is funding Auragent’s aim of:
- increasing the manufacturing scale of their plasmonic fluor technology to an early commercial scale
- more extensively validate enhancement of a variety of popular antibody microarrays
- finalize the design of an inexpensive microarray ‘reader’ they’re developing
- and more fully develop microarray analysis software that Auragent is also developing.
Back in the lab at WUSTL
Meanwhile, Singamaneni and his team received an undisclosed amount of funding to develop a plasmonic fluor based biosensor (hopefully) 100 times more sensitive compared with the conventional SARS-CoV-2 antibody detection methods in use at this time, allowing clinicians to more easily find positive cases and (again, hopefully) lessen the chance of false negatives.
