Researchers at the University of Manchester, in collaboration with Iceni Glycoscience are re-thinking lateral flow diagnostics to replace the antibody components with glycans (sugars). Glycans coat all our cells and are the first targets of many viruses and many bacterial or animal toxins and hence are an appealing, but unexplored target.
Lateral flow diagnostics (LFDs) are robust, easy to manufacture and require very little user training, making them ideal for point of care, or related diagnostics: The COVID-19 LFDs are a prime example of this. At the heart of LFDs are the signal generating (red line) component which are nanoparticles of gold, which are coated with antibodies which target the pathogen or other analyte of interest.
In this academic/industry collaboration the team will make use of modern nanotechnology to tune the nanoparticle dimensions and size, and also replace the antibodies with glycans. Professor Gibson (academic lead at Manchester) and Iceni Glycoscience (Dr Simone Dedola and Prof Robert Field) previously collaborated to make a COVID-19 diagnostic based on glycans, which unlocked the opportunity in this field.
Looking forward the team want to expand the diagnostic potential from proteins, to whole intact pathogens and to adapt the devices to unlock solution-phase diagnostics as well as in LFD format. The team will also explore the stability of the diagnostics to temperature and other stressors to widen the range of application areas.