MEDIOMICS, LLC — Department of Health and Human Services SBIR Phase I: NCI

Description

Although recent developments in highly sensitive technologies have revolutionized research on RNA modifications the available quantitative methods can be further improved Current methods include liquid chromatography tandem mass spectroscopy LC MS MS and next generation sequencing coupled with modification specific antibodies The LC MS MS method is not accessible to many researcher scientists due to its high cost and specialization Deep sequencing is only useful for research on specific RNA modifications if high quality antibodies are commercially available We found there are at least a dozen RNA modifications that are not commercially available but have been suggested to be related to cancer suggesting a gap in the antibody market Furthermore though antibody pull down followed by RT qPCR can be used to evaluate the modification of a specific RNA this method is not site specific and will not work well when there are multiple modification sites in one targeted RNA There is a need for a simpler method to quantitatively analyze site specific RNA modifications beyond the current options available Here we propose to fill the gap in next generation sequencing approach by developing high affinity antibodies for cancer related modifications with no commercially available antibodies and develop simpler alternative methods for the site specific quantification of RNA modifications using Mediomics PINCER technology