S-BIO, a division of Tokyo-based Sumitomo Bakelite Co. Ltd., will launch its BlotGlyco O-Glycan Sample Preparation Kit, a new product that enables scientists to analyse O-glycans in biological samples, including biotherapeutic glycoproteins, in a simple, safe and streamlined operation. This new product will be launched simultaneously in Japan and United States in late May 2015.
S-BIO claims that the kit is a valuable tool supporting customers involved in glycoprotein characterization in research and process development, monitoring and batch release, and characterization of previously unattainable information on O-glycan structures.
Glycans are sugar chains composed of linear and/or branched sequences of several carbohydrates. Changes in glycosylation are often a hallmark of disease states such as cancers, virus infection, etc. Characterizing the changes in glycosylation associated with cancer and chronic inflammation can lead to new therapeutic and diagnostic strategies.
In biotherapeutics development, such as antibody drugs, it has been shown that glycans influence their yield, efficacy, immunogenicity and stability of the biotherapeutic agent.
Sumitomo Bakelite explained that the company has developed the new tool that enables safe and straightforward O-glycan sample preparation. The kit consists of O-glycan release reagent and BlotGlyco glycan purification and labeling beads. The kit enables researchers to recover O-glycans with the tag of the user's choice depending on analytical method, such as HPLC/UPLC, LC-MS, MALDI-TOF MS, CE/CE-LIF analysis.
The new product BlotGlyco O-Glycan Sample Preparation Kit will be an accessible tool for safe and simple O-glycan analysis, which is readily applicable for screening and quality control of biotherapeutics process development as well as biomarker discovery and regenerative medicine research. The product will be available in the US through S-BIO, Vaupell Holdings Inc., a Sumitomo Bakelite Co. Ltd. group company.
