Precision Antibody to develop antibodies for NCI's Clinical Proteomic Technologies for Cancer

Precision Antibody(TM) has been selected as the antibody developer for a component of the National Cancer Institute (NCI)'s Clinical Proteomic Technologies for Cancer (CPTC), which is focused on improving the number and standardizing the quality of monoclonal antibody reagents available for clinical cancer proteomics research. The contract award is the result of a third solicitation for contract proposals from custom antibody suppliers as part of the Clinical Proteomic Reagents Resources component of the CPTC, whose mission is to develop high-quality, standardized, renewable reagents that are needed for effective proteomic analysis.

The contract is awarded to private companies through a competitive bidding process managed by Science Applications International Corporation-Frederick (SAIC-F), a wholly owned subsidiary of SAIC that operates the National Cancer Institute's leading center for cancer and AIDS research in Frederick, Maryland.

NCI's CPTC is a five-year, $104 million initiative to develop new proteomics tools and technologies that will accelerate discovery and clinical research in cancer. The antibody initiative of the CPTC's Clinical Proteomic Reagents Resource project was launched in late 2007 to address a major obstacle hindering the progress of proteomics research: The relatively small number of antibodies generated against proteins of interest, and their generally variable quality. The goal of the antibody initiative is to develop a standardized resource of very high-quality reference antibodies generated against cancer-related proteins of interest that will be made available to proteomics researchers, along with characterization data and other information intended to support replication and standardization.

"We are very pleased that SAIC-Frederick has selected Precision Antibody to contribute to this important initiative," said Jun Hayashi, Ph.D., Vice President of Precision Antibody. "Our goal is to rapidly develop and optimize antibodies for the target cancer-related antigens we have been assigned, which will help accelerate the NCI's creation of a public resource of gold-standard antibodies to advance proteomics research."

The terms of the contract call for Precision Antibody to apply its proprietary rapid antibody-generation technology to develop three monoclonal antibodies against each of 20 cancer-related target antigens produced by Argonne National Laboratory that have been identified to be of high interest to the cancer proteomics community. Other terms were not disclosed.

Following screening and initial characterization by Precision Antibody, SAIC-F will undertake screening and additional characterization of the antibodies. Techniques used in the rigorous characterization process may include ELISA and indirect ELISA, Western blot, antibody isotype, SDS-PAGE, surface plasma resonance, immunohistochemistry, immunoprecipitation, immunofluorescence, and immuno-mass spectrometry. Final characterization will be completed by the Biodesign Institute at Arizona State University and by the Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm, Sweden, which runs the Human Protein Atlas, a comprehensive database that provides protein expression profiles for a large number of human proteins.

Once characterized and produced, NCI's final renewable, highly characterized, high-affinity antibodies and their producing hybridoma cells will be made commercially available to the research community through the Developmental Studies Hybridoma Bank at the University of Iowa. To ensure that experiments can be both repeated and compared among researchers, detailed standard operating procedures will also be provided, along with characterization data that will be available to the scientific community via a web portal (http://antibodies.cancer.gov)