Caltech, Integrated Diagnostics Win Gates Grant for Point-of-Care HIV Test

摘要

Dec. 23, 2011 (ProteoMonitor) — Researchers from Integrated Diagnostics and the California Institute of Technology have won a $500,000 Gates Foundation grant to develop a protein capture-based point-of-care device for HIV diagnosis. Caltech professorand Integrated co-founder Jim Heath will lead the project, which aims to use Integrated Diagnostics' Protein-Catalyzed Capture Agents, or PCCs, a click chemistry-based class of protein affinity reagents it introduced several months ago. The diagnostic will determine HIV status by detecting anti-HIV antibodies in patients. This is currently a common method of detecting the virus, Health told ProteoMonitor, but, he noted, existing tests — which typically use a peptide made from an immunogenic epitope onHIV to detect these antibodies — don't account for the differences in antibodies produced across a population, which can hamper their sensitivity.