In a November 20, 2013 press release, Labcyte Inc., the acoustic dispensing company, announced that it has been awarded $1 million to create an innovative process to detect cancer-related proteins in samples, with initial work in breast cancer detection. The unsurpassed precision and accuracy of Labcyte acoustic liquid handling enables biomarker detection by measuring multiple proteins with a MALDI mass spectrometer. Recent work with the Canary Center at Stanford, also supported by the National Cancer Institute, showed the ability to achieve the sensitivity required for quantifying very small amounts of proteins associated with ovarian cancer. Measuring the amount of multiple proteins, and at lower cost, is an essential step in developing new diagnostic tools for disease treatment and monitoring. This cutting-edge process encompasses stable standards and capture of biomarkers with antibodies and expects to achieve greater throughput than traditional liquid chromatography-mass spectrometric approaches. The utility of this technique will be tested by simultaneously analyzing 16 different biomarkers, run in quadruplicate, to simulate the analysis of 64 unique biomarkers. The process has the potential to expand to a greater number of biomarkers as well. It may enable significant advances in diagnostics and discovery. "I am particularly enthusiastic about participating with Labcyte on the further development of their protein multiplexed biomarker detection platform,” said Dr. Mark Stolowitz, Director of the Proteomics Core Facility at the Canary Center at Stanford for Cancer Early Detection. “This novel immunoaffinity mass spectrometry-based approach exploits MALDI-TOF-MS for detection of proteotypic peptides.Login Or Register To Read Full Story