Technology

King's academics have developed a practical and efficient approach to identify clinically important protein variants. The method has several advantages over the standard biochemical diagnosis methods which depend on either isoelectric focussing of cation exchange chromatography used at present.

The advantages include:

• protein variants can be identified in less than 5 minutes
• clinically relevant positives can be rapidly identified over clinically non-relevant variants
• blood spot samples can be used rather than the need for raw samples
• variants can be identified in samples from homozygous (sufferers) and heterozygote (carriers) patients.

Market

The neonatal and antenatal screening for haemoglobinopathies is a prime example where the method would be extremely effective. In the UK there are 600 thousand neonatal screens a year. Antenatal screening is only offered by some health authorities. Countries where there is a high incidence of patients likely to have haemoglobinopathies include the US, Eastern Mediterranean countries, the middle east and Brazil.

Benefits

For sellers of MSMS machines there is an opportunity to increase the attractiveness of the use of machines to a wide range of service providers. For Health Service providers there is a huge cost saving in time and cost of performing neonatal and antenatal screens. The system can be automated allowing screening to be centralized and is less labour intensive than the standard biochemical procedures used.

Development

The system is in the process of being validated for the neonatal screening of haemoglobinopathies in the UK.

The technology is being patent protected.

Licensing partners are sought for this technology.