Bio-Rad's antibody binding affinities.

Bio-Rad Laboratories is to collaborate with Integral Molecular, Inc. to offer the first system for rapidly and reproducibly characterizing the binding affinities of antibodies to diverse integral membrane proteins, including GPCRs and ion channels. Integral Molecular, a solution provider for scientific research and drug discovery applications involving integral membrane proteins, has developed a technology, the Lipoparticle, that enables integral membrane protein interactions to be measured using Bio-Rad's label-free, high throughput ProteOn XPR36 Protein Interaction Array System.

Understanding antibody binding characteristics is critical for the screening of new drug candidates and developing reagents that achieve optimal pharmacological characteristics. Current methods for measuring the binding affinity of ligands to transmembrane proteins require the use of whole cells or cell membrane preparations, which are heterogeneous and too impure to generate high quality, reproducible biosensor data. The challenges with these methods have thus far constrained the study of ligand binding strengths to a limited number of integral membrane proteins. Integral Molecular's proprietary Lipoparticle technology offers scientists working with membrane-bound targets a standardized reagent with higher concentrations of membrane proteins than cell membrane preparations.