Partners

Partner 18: Domainex Ltd, London.

Principal Investigator: Dr Renos Savva

Domainex Ltd. is a spin-out company from the Bloomsbury Centre for Structural Biology that provides a unique and proprietary technology (Combinatorial Domain Hunting; CDH) to resolve a common bottleneck facing the pharmaceutical and biotechnology industries in the post-genomic era. The application of CDH aims to bridge the discovery 'gap' between conceptual identification of new targets, and their practical validation and exploitation. Potential new targets for drug development and vaccine development can be found from genomic and proteomic screening, but exploitation of these discoveries, either in terms of structural or functional characterisation, absolutely requires the availability of soluble and expressible protein in multi-milligram quantities. Developing protein production systems for new targets is often the rate-limiting step in translating the theoretical promise of genomics into the practical reality of therapeutics. The CDH technology aims to accelerate the development process by rapidly identifying constructs of the target gene that express multi-milligram levels of the stable, soluble protein you need for downstream analysis. In CDH we generate an unbiased, finely-sampled fragment library of your target gene, with a specified size range, and optionally recoded for optimal codon usage and elimination of mRNA secondary structure. We feed this through our high-throughput screening protocol, which provides a single "holistic" readout, simultaneously measuring transcriptional and translational efficiency, stability, solubility and yield of each of thousands of different protein fragments. Unlike fusion-protein/complementation approaches, our system is relatively free of "passenger solubilisation" artefacts and selective pressures that generate false positives. Development of CDH for applications to different classes of protein target is underway.