Posts Tagged ‘medical diagnostics’
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March 31st, 2010
Nature report on exciting new technology
Nature news has just published a feature on the work of Professor Molly Stevens from Imperial College, London. The article, which was written on the back of a presentation given at the recent ACS Spring meeting in San Francisco, details Molly’s work which is focused on developing simple sensing techniques based on gold nanoparticle technology. The science involved is elegant, and has real potential for delivering practical, cost-effective and robust diagnostic devices.
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December 11th, 2009
Medical nanotechnologies making strides
Two recent press releases have illustrated the ongoing progress of nanotechnology in the fields of therapeutics and diagnostics. In the first AuraSense LLC, the company spun out of Northwestern University by Chad Mirkin, has raised $2.5 million in funding to commercialise technology that employs gold nanoparticles to help treat cardiovascular disease.
The second release details the progress of MagForce Nanotechnologies, which has culminated in the German organisation applying for European regulatory approval of its Nano-Cancer® therapy. This therapy allows the targeted destruction of tumors using superparamagnetic nanoparticles to generate heat.
Both of these announcements are exciting, and illustrate tangible progress in the commercialisation of medical nanotechnologies. We are looking forward to seeing plenty more positive reports of this sort in the coming months!
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October 20th, 2009
Nanosphere news
Nanosphere, the nanotechnology-based healthcare company, has just released this press release announcing it has received 501(k) clearance from the US Food & Drug Administration for its influenza A & B and Respiratory Syncytial Virus (RSV) test and the Verigene SP System, with complete sample-to-result automation. This is an important milestone, as it allows patients access to the patented gold nanoparticle-based technology for influenza diagnosis in time for the coming flu season.
In a second piece of positive news for the company, a study has shown that the company’s gold-based technology has detected a protein specific to prostate cancer in 86 percent of blood samples compared with 25 percent for conventional tests. This data has been published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, and has received widespread media coverage (for example see here for a thorough Bloomberg article).
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August 26th, 2009
Gold-related publications (part 2!)
Following on from my post yesterday I was impressed to find yet more innovative gold research published in another high level chemistry journal. On this occasion the latest issue of Nature Chemistry carries two interesting gold articles, one of which even graces the front cover…
Professor Vince Rotello’s team from the University of Massachusetts have penned a fascinating paper entitled “Sensing of proteins in human serum using conjugates of nanoparticles and green fluorescent protein”, which has made the cover of this issue of Nature Chemistry for good reason. The paper describes the group’s progress in the development of a gold nanoparticle-based sensor system capable of detecting specific proteins at biorelevant concentrations in both buffer and human serum. Being able to detect protein imbalances in serum is an important tool for disease diagnosis, but complicated because it contains >20,000 different proteins at a vast range of concentrations. The science described by Rotello’s team represents highly sensitive array-based sensor system, and a significant improvement on previous polymer-based sensor arrays.
The second paper in this issue of Nature Chemistry is from the labs of Dean Toste at the University of California and William Goddard III at CalTech. They propose a bonding model for gold(1) carbene complexes, where the carbon-gold bond in the cationic intermediates comprise varying degrees of both σ- and π-bonding. The paper then describes a series of experiments that illustrate the correlation between bonding and reactivity is reflected in the yield of gold-catalysed cyclopropanation reactions.
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August 13th, 2009
Nanosphere and Lilly collaboration announced
Nanosphere, the nanotechnology-based healthcare organisation, has announced that it has entered into a collaboration with Eli Lilly, one of the world’s leading healthcare companies. This tie-up is in connection with employing pharmacogenetic assays in drug development initiatives. Pharmacogenetics is the study of genetic variation within individuals that gives rise to differing response to drugsNanosphere is probably best known for the Verigene system, which is a benchtop molecular diagnostics workstation that utilises patented gold nanoparticle technology to detect nucleic acid and protein targets of interest for a variety of applications. The company has been developing pharmacogenetic assays specifically for use with the Verigene diagnostic system, an activity which has delivered an exciting commercial opportunity judging by yesterday’s announcement…
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March 2nd, 2009
New patent on Colloidal Gold Production
Colloidal gold is routinely manufactured by many precious metal companies by a process based on the ancient Purple of Cassius route (see L B Hunt, Gold Bull, 9 (4), 24-31, 1976) but with process improvements to give more consistent processes and products. For example, it is used to produce colloidal gold pink enamels for the decoration of pottery and as biomedical diagnostic agents.
The classic Gold Bulletin papers by Turkevich (Gold Bull, 18 (3) 86-91 and 18 (4), 125-131, 1985) describe the process chemistry and properties of the colloids produced. Properties are dependent on colloid particle size but a problem is that it is difficult to produce colloids to a defined particole size in practice at the commercial scale.
Aimed at use as an in-vitro diagnostic agent with improved sensitivity and reliability, a new European patent application from Tanaka KK, Japan, EP2027956 (A1), was published on 25th February 2009. This is aimed at producing gold colloids with a targeted particle size, a sharp size distribution and a uniform, perfectly spherical shape. This process differs from the traditional ones in that it comprises several steps: a nucleation step and one or more subsequent growth steps, each of which involves additions of gold salt solution and reducing agent to the original nucleation solution. In the nucleation stage, a citrate is used as the reducing agent, whereas an ascorbate is used in the growth stages as the reducing agent. The number of growth steps controls the size of colloidal particle attained. The amount of gold salt and ascorbate added in each of the growth stages is defined in terms of a formula related to the number of gold atoms deposited. This method is claimed to produce spherical gold colloids in the size range of about 17 – 220nm plus with a particle size distribution having a standard deviation of 10% or less.
It would be interesting to see how this multi-step approach might be applied to gold catalyst production where nanosized gold particles of tightly controlled size are critical to catalyst performance.
Trevor Keel
Chris Corti
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