InteliSpark client Enable Biosciences, Inc. has been awarded a Phase II Small Business Innovative Research (SBIR) grant totaling $750,000 from the National Science Foundation (NSF). Their project “development of an ultrasensitive, high-throughput autoantibody discovery platform using agglutination-PCR” will provide work towards developing a platform technology for detecting autoantibody markers for research and clinical diagnostics.
Currently, precision medicine is in need of the development of more powerful bioanalytic technologies to diagnose disease and direct target therapies. Enable Biosciences has developed a platform, the Antibody Detection by Agglutination-PCR (ADAP), that uses a ligation-based DNA barcoding technology for improved antibody detection, with increased analytical sensitivity and multiplex power to detect more at the most clinically useful time. Additionally, their product is able to detect numerous clinically-relevant autoantibodies that are refractory to common techniques like ELISA. Current technologies scale poorly due to cross-analyte interference, and lack of analytical sensitivity to detect crippling diseases.
This platform holds the potential of accelerating the development of lifesaving diagnostics in a variety of human diseases. In the Phase II project, Enable Biosciences will develop the first solution-phase, ultrasensitive, and multiplex antibody assay platform for early detection, monitoring, and treatment of human diseases. Enable Biosciences will now be able to validate the multiplex ADAP assay for clinical diagnostics, high-throughput automation of the multiplex ADAP assay technology for clinical diagnostics, manufacture and establish quality control standards, and demonstrate the applicability of the platform for a broader set of antibodies.