Medsaic sets out to capture research sector

Medsaic is one of those good news stories about a little idea made big that everyone likes to hear about. Established in 2000 as a spin-off from the University of Sydney to commercialise a new type of protein microarray, Medsaic has one product on the market already and is now about to offer a new version for researchers that should make their jobs much cheaper and much easier.

Last year Medsaic released DotScan, a rapid diagnostic for leukaemia and lymphoma that was quickly taken up by Mayne Pathology, now Symbion Health, and also assigned a Medicare rebate item number. DotScan is a single-use diagnostic chip that is able to characterise about 88 differential antibodies for leukaemia and lymphoma. The DotScan system contains a peripheral slide reader for capturing an optical image of the test slide and a software package for data analysis.

The leukaemia and lymphoma chip (LEU001) is just the first of many, with the company planning more products targeting other malignancies, including solid tissue tumours, together with a range of autoimmune diseases.

This month, the company is on track to launch an enhanced version of the technology aimed squarely at the research community, offering scientists a general purpose discovery chip (DIS001) containing anywhere from 80 to 200 different markers, Medsaic's CEO, Dr Jeremy Chrisp, says.

"DotScan has always been a platform technology but we initially focused on leukaemia, which we are still active in," Chrisp says. "Now we are broadening out the same platform technology but adding a lot more different antibodies to the chip for research purposes."

"We are doing a big push into the basic research area and are releasing this general purpose discovery chip for research. We are also about to release a murine chip, which would appeal to every researcher who is using a mouse model to study disease."

Medsaic's platform technology is based on cell capture by microarrays of antibodies bound to nitrocellulose-coated slides. The technology was developed in 1998 when it was discovered that cells could be captured and bound to the slide purely by the antibody-antigen reaction, Chrisp says.

"We were microdotting monoclonal antibodies onto a glass slide and found that this alone, with a clever bit of technology, allowed us to capture cells.

"Our founding inventors, Professors Richard Christopherson and Cristobal dos Remedios, discovered that the platform was universal for cell capture, allowing us to discriminate diseases simply by microdotting the differential antibodies that describe the disease.

"They then found a way of washing off the unbound cells and later Medsaic developed proprietary technology for rapid imaging of the chip. Now we have a solid phase platform of the same size as a standard microscope slide, surface-coated with nitrocellulose, which we can microdot in-house with any discriminatory protein.

"And we can put almost any cell population on it. That's why we are looking at many other diseases because it works for bone marrow cells, lymph nodes, biopsies and stem cells as well as peripheral blood leukocytes.

"One of the subtleties is that we can actually capture cells. Most diagnostic tests perform the analysis and then lose the sample material. Our cells are bound and preserved and you can re-examine those cells several years later, which then opens up the window for many other subsequent assessments. No one else is doing a cell capture array in Australia, and probably globally."

Chrisp also says there is no reason why clinicians cannot use the company's proteomics platform for other analyses such as for DNA. "If you are interested in what allele aberrations you might have on a particular chromosome, this information may well be available in the future from our platform. If you want to look purely at the morphology of cells, you can add stains and dyes to the platform, including florescent labels."

For the research community, Medsaic will also be offering a custom chip service, he says. "If a customer has 20 or so special antibodies they are interested in, we can put on a production run with their 20 antibodies added to one of our current chip panels.

"There are also substantial economies of scale. Our technology is highly cost effective as we can look at 100 to 200 different proteins concurrently, all on the one chip and in a low-cost environment. You will get a lot of quality data from these surface bound proteins very quickly, which is one of its great strengths."