The agreement – financials of which have not been divulged – will see Innova, a subsidiary of Germany-headquarterd Sygnis AG, supply bioreagent manufacturer US Biological with its Lightening-Link antibody labelling technology.
“Antibodies conjugated to a label (such as an enzyme, fluorescent dye, biotin etc) are used to detect and visualise the presence of a target such as an antigen in a sample, which is required across many areas of research and development,” Alastair Carrington, VP of Business Development at Innova told this publication.
The platform is “incredibly simple,” according to Carrington: “The researcher just pipettes their antibody or protein into a lyophilized vial of the Lightning-Link label – then incubates for 20 minutes (or 3 hours depending on the label).
“The antibody will be covalently bound to the label, without any further wash or separation steps, and with no loss of antibody or protein.”
And while there are other labelling platforms available, Carrington said the Lightening-Link technology requires no separation or wash steps post conjugation and results in reproducible results.
“There is no antibody or protein loss, which saves customers wasting expensive reagent,” he explained. “The kits only require 30 seconds hands-on time, whereas other kits available require laborious multi-step procedures.”
US Biological will use Lightning-Link as its preferred antibody conjugation technology to expand its existing catalogue by enabling the production of additional labels.