November 2011, Biodesy awarded prestigious grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF)

Biodesy announce their receipt of a Phase I Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR ) grant from the National Science Foundation. This grant was awarded to further Biodesy’s work on its revolutionary SHG platform to advance the understanding of the conformational changes that occur in the key therapeutic protein kinase, Abl kinase, in response to type-I and type-II inhibitors. According to the NSF, fewer than 10% of grant proposals were funded in 2011.

March 2011, Biodesy Present Data at 17th Annual SBS Conference: Poster voted in the top 10 at the conference

Biodesy recently presented two posters at the 17th annual SBS conference In Orlando, Florida:

• Direct, Real-time Detection of kinase type II inhibitors using Second Harmonic Generation (SHG) Detection
• Demand for inactive conformation inhibitors of kinases (so-called type II compounds) is high. Interest is fueled by the striking clinical success of Gleevec, targeted primarily to Abl kinase, against chronic myeloid leukemia (CML). However, traditional methods for identifying these inhibitors rely on techniques which are slow and labor intensive. To address this shortcoming, we applied SHG detection to develop a rapid and facile assay for detecting type II inhibitors in Abl kinase.
• Direct, Real-time Detection of Protein Conformation: Revealing Therapeutic Opportunities using Second Harmonic Generation (SHG) Detection
• Direct detection of protein conformational change offers a significant opportunity for the design of structural-specific therapeutics. We have adapted Second Harmonic Generation (SHG), an optical technique to a discovery format to detect conformational change in a series of protein standards which represent a range of movement (rigid to floppy.)  We will describe our use of SHG to screen and identify inhibitors of spermine-induced conformation change in monomeric alpha-synuclein, a key protein implicated in the etiology of Parkinson’s disease.

Our poster demonstrating the ability of SHG to identify characteristic responses of type-II kinase inhibitors of the therapeutically relevant protein kinase, Abl-kinase, was voted amongst the top 10 poster presentations at the conference. To download a copy of this and the second poster, please click the links above.

November 2010, Biodesy awarded a Qualifying Therapeutic Discovery Project (QTDP) grant

Biodesy has been awarded a QTDP grant for its program in Parkinson’s disease. This grant provides funds to further the development of therapeutics targeted to alpha-synuclein for Parkinson’s disease using our unique SHG technology.

October 2010, Biodesy to present at the upcoming Parkinson’s Therapeutic conference organized by the Michael J Fox Foundation

Biodesy will present its latest advances on Parkinson’s research using SHG detection.