Technology

The vision of LAE Biotechnology Co., Ltd. is to serve the research community by raising specific antibodies that can recognize any desirable protein. We also aim to develop antibody-related products for therapeutic purposes, diagnosis use, and most importantly, research. To produce polyclonal or monoclonal antibodies against target protein, it needs purified protein or synthetic peptide as immunogen. However, it always associates with difficulties in the purification of the desirable protein. On the other hand, if scientists would like to avoid protein purification and decide to use synthetic peptide as immunogen, there are also problems associated with peptide-based immunization. Most of the time, synthetic peptide fails to induce antibodies due to its low immunogenicity and short half-life. In order to solve this problem, LAE Biotechnology Co., Ltd. employs a technique named “Linear Array Epitope?(LAE) developed by Dr. Jaulang Hwang, whose findings have been published1 and patented2. With this technique, he constructs DNA fragments encoding epitopes in a linear array. This powerful technology that combines the use of receptor-mediated uptake and efficient antigen presentation allows the induction of immune responses to generate antibodies against any antigen, including self-antigens.

The advantage of our technology is that customers need not supply any purified protein or synthetic peptide. They only need to provide the amino acid sequence (10~12 amino acids) of the epitope that they would like the antibody to recognize. We will give customers good quality antiserum in 4~6 months after ordering.

The LAE technology has been tested with many different epitopes. Two polyclonal antibodies against DNA topoisomeras II-a (TOP2-a) and DNA topoisomerase II-b(TOP2-b) have been produced with LAE immunogen against TOP2-a and TOP2-b, respectively. As shown in the figure 1, these two antibodies clearly distinguish these two enzymes and do not cross-react with each other.

Figure 1. DNA topoisomeras II-a (TOP2-a) (lane 2) and DNA topoisomerase II-b (TOP2-b) (lane 1) are detected by Western-blot with two different polyclonal antibodies produced by LAE immunogens against TOP2-a and TOP2-b, respectively.

In addition to offer the better quality of our antibodies, using LAE technology also has the following advantages: 1) we have high successful rate of antibodies production, 2) the antibodies raised by LAE immunogen are monoclonal-like polyclonal antibodies.

[1] Publication: Hsu, C-T., Ting, C-Y., Ting, C-J., Chen, T-Y., Lin, C-P., Whang-Peng, J., and Hwang, J. (2000) Vaccination against gonadotropin-releasing hormone (GnRH) using toxin receptor-binding domain-conjugated GnRH repeats. Cancer Res. 60, 3701-3705.

[2] Patents: “Peptide Repeat Immunogens?based on the technique of the Linear Array of Epitope (LAE) for demanding patent has been filed to USA, European Community, Taiwan, Japan, Australia and New Zealand by the Office of Public Affaires of Academia Sinica. Patents filed: US - US Patent Application Serial No. 09/412,558, filed on October 5, 1999. European Community - European Patent Application No. 00304253.8, filed on May 19, 2000. Taiwan/Japan/Australia patent pending. Patents granted: New Zealand on October 26, 2001 (Patent No. 507368).