caprotec bioanalytics issued U.S. patent for CCMS proteome analysis technology

caprotec bioanalytics GmbH announced today that the United States Patent Office has issued patent No. US9,034,789 covering its revolutionary Capture Compound Mass Spectrometry (CCMS) technology.

The newly granted patent titled "Capture Compounds , Collections Thereof and Methods for Analyzing the Proteome and Complex Compositions" complements the company's patent portfolio of more than 40 issued patents in countries including the European Union, Canada, Australia, Singapore, Hong Kong, Japan, Israel and India.

CCMS, one of the leading technologies in chemical proteomics, is a platform technology allowing in general terms to investigate any small molecule (e.g. drug candidate) protein interactions irrespective of the structure of the small molecule, or the biological origin of the sample to be investigated. CCMS has been successfully employed in biological samples from bacteria, plants, insects, animals to humans. CCMS can identify interacting proteins in a large variety of preparations from cell lysates, tissue homogenates, sub-cellular fractions/organelles to living cells. It can also be used to investigate small molecule interactions with intracellular proteins in living cells.

The CCMS process is unbiased and leads directly to the drug-specific functional sub-proteome employing any complex biological sample.

An important application of the CCMS technology is, subsequent to a phenotypic screen, to profile small molecule drug - protein interactions in the human proteome to discover protein drug targets (target deconvolution) and the mode of drug action. Due to the unbiased nature of the CCMS process it identifies in the same experiment the drug target as well as off-targets potentially causing adverse side effects in humans and also proteins previously unknown to interact with the drug potentially leading to alternative medical indications (drug repositioning/repurposing). CCMS enables the identification of membrane proteins such as ion channels, receptor tyrosine kinases and GPCRs.

CCMS has also been used to identify and isolate circulating tumor cells and to identify protein biomarkers for patient stratification to identify responders and non-responders to a given drug treatment.

"This is a significant milestone in achieving global patent protection of the company's CCMS proteome analysis technology," said Dr. Hubert Koester, founder and Managing Director/CEO of caprotec bioanalytics GmbH. "The unique advantages of the CCMS platform, including the discovery of specific protein interactors for any small molecule and the deconvoluting of targets for mechanism of action or toxicity in all tissues, enables drug development companies to make earlier and more effective data driven decisions for optimization and lead selection."

The company is actively involved in research collaborations with pharmaceutical and biopharmaceutical companies applying CCMS technology along the drug development process.