(Taiwan) Academia Sinica develops microarray tool for cancer, virus detection :: BiotechEast - Taiwan and China biotechnology, medical devices, pharmaceuticals, ^¤å½s×, ^¤å×§ï ::

(BiotechEast staff)

22 April, 2006
The Genomics Research Center of Academia Sinica, Taiwan's leading research institute, announced on Friday that it had developed a new carbohydrate microarray which will enable the detection of cancers and viruses.

The technology was developed by Dr. Wong Chi-huey, director of the center, using the programmable one-pot synthesis of oligosaccharides as the basis of a new fabrication method for the production of carbohydrate microarrays (otherwise known as 'sugar chips')

Wong's research was published in the latest issue of the international chemical journal Angewandte Chemie (Angew. Chem. Int. Ed. 2006, 45, 2753-2757).

This new breakthrough enables the rapid synthesis of oligosaccharides and their attachment to glass slides through a photosensitive linker, so that the arrays can be directly read by mass spectrometry.

Since the introduction of gene arrays (also known as 'gene chips'), genomic research progressed rapidly and various genetic variations related to diseases have been identified. However, the actual usefulness of this research is limited because the result of gene array analysis may not be directly correlated with the function at the protein level. Understanding the relationship between genetic changes and disease states represents a new challenge, and functional genomics or proteomics has thus become an important subject for study.

Development of carbohydrate microarrays would provide a new tool for the study of carbohydrate-protein interaction and for the identification of carbohydrate receptors or ligands associated with cancer or viral infection.

The work reported by Wong and postdoctoral associates Dr. Chung-Yi Wu and others, has solved a long-standing problem in carbohydrate array development. One-pot synthesis allows a rapid access to a large number of oligosaccharides which have been very difficult to obtain by other means.

In addition, the array can be read directly by mass spectrometry, when equipped with a 377-nm laser which will cleave the sugar from the glass surface for direct characterization.

According to the method, one milligram of saccharides can be used for 100-million spots on the surface and each glass slide can have thousands of spots, each with different saccharides.

"In combination with the technology used in the semiconductor industry and the strengths of synthetic carbohydrate chemistry as well as mass spectrometry at the Genomics Research Center, we plan to develop a new carbohydrate array system for the high-throughput functional analysis of glycoproteins and oligosaccharides," said Wong.

The reported array technology has been transferred to an unnamed biotech company for the further development and commercialization of carbohydrate microarrays.

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