Rosaura Valle

Rosaura Valle, PhD, vice president of operations and strategic alliances at Milagen, says that they use full-size polyclonal antibodies, which have several advantages over monoclonals in screening.Polyclonal antibodies have different affinities and target different sites on an antigen, giving them broader ranges of reactivity.Milagen currently has a collection of about 70,000 high-affinity antibodies against human gene products.Milagen can produce antibodies against virtually every protein in a living organism at the rate of about 18,000 every 4 months.

Valle describes Milagen as a research and development company whose technology can be used in drug discovery both for the identification of novel targets for therapeutic purposes and for the identification of antibodies that are disease-specific.She says that Milagen has already been successful in identifying a stage-specific antibody for a particular cancer.

Milagen uses its antibody chips to screen clinical samples, such as body fluids, sera, blood, and urine.Called Antibody Chips for Predictive Medicine, this approach uses biological fluids from a patient and eliminates the need to prepare DNA or RNA samples.The goal of this approach is to develop noninvasive and cost-effective diagnostic assays that can be used to predict disease state or progression.

Domantis Ltd., Abington, UK, formerly known as Diversys, has developed a unique way to generate large arrays.This technology, termed combinatorial Matrix Screening, employs a grid of intersecting lines to create an array that can be used for high-throughput screening of proteins.