caprotec bioanalytics Announces the Successful Completion of a Collaborative Research Project With Roche

06-30-2010: caprotec bioanalytics GmbH announced that it has successfully completed a research collaboration with F. Hoffmann-La Roche, Basel, Switzerland. Under the collaboration research agreement, caprotec used its proprietary CCMS (Capture Compound Mass Spectrometry) technology to analyze the binding characteristics and interaction of one undisclosed drug candidate with its human target proteins.

To identify selectively interacting proteins of a drug molecule, it is coupled to caprotec’s Capture Compound™ scaffold and incubated with human cell lysates, subcellular fractions or whole cells. Interacting proteins are then isolated and identified via Liquid Chromatography-Mass Spectrometry/Mass. Among the protein targets that demonstrated specific binding of Roche’s drug molecule were some which show activity in pathways commensurate with the phenotypic profile of the candidate drug molecule.

“The results of this drug-protein profiling study confirm again the capability of our CCMS technology to directly isolate a functional subset of proteins from a complex biological sample for the identification of previously unknown interactions with small molecules,” said Dr. Hubert Köster, CEO of caprotec. “This fills a crucial technological gap in the arsenal of methods available for optimizing drug structures and to select the most promising candidate drugs before entering the clinical trial process as well as drug safety assessment.”