A method for the rapid generation of phosphorylation profiles

Licensing opportunity

A method for rapidly generating phosphorylation profiles of any cell, tissue or body fluid, for detecting deregulated signalling networks in diseases including cancer, for drug target discovery, assessing drug side effects and biomarker discovery, amongst other applications, is available for license from ETH Zurich.  

Reversible phosphorylation of proteins, carried out by kinases and phosphatases, constitutes one of the most important regulatory mechanisms in eukaryotic cells, controlling most biological processes. Disruption of these enzymes and the consequent effects on signalling networks underlie diseases such as cancer and diabetes.

In contrast to investigating the phosphorylation state of a single protein, the analysis and understanding of the phosphorylation patterns on a system-wide scale allows for the identification of central regulators and therefore of potential drug targets in the disregulated networks.

The invention consists of three consecutive steps. First, proteomes are digested using a protease, phosphopeptides are isolated and submitted to high performance mass spectrometry to generate phosphoproteome maps. These are annotated with the amino acid sequence of the detected phosphopeptide features and several computational steps are taken to determine the statistically significant regulated phosphorylation sites between different cell states/samples and the most informative regulated phosphorylation sites These markers are then used to quantitatively monitor the phosphorylation state of cells, tissues or body fluid.

For more information, see the information sheet at: http://www.switt.ch/files/technologien/08-003_Method_for_the_rapid_generation_of_phosphorylation_profiles.pdf

Or contact the ETH Zurich transfer office by phone (+41 44 632 23 82) or by email ([email protected]), citing reference T-08-003.