Pharmacy

Researchers have developed microchips stuffed    with    highly    sensitive 'nanosensors' that analyze how proteins bind to one another. This is a vital step for assessing the effectiveness and possible side-effects of a potential medication. Moreover, these biosensor microchips could significantly speed up the process of drug development. "You can fit thousands, even tens of thousands, of different proteins of interest on the same chip and run the protein-binding experiments in one shot," said Dr Shan Wang, Professor - Materials Science & Engineering, and      Electrical      Engineering, Stanford University, who led the research effort.

This one centimetre sized array of the nanosensors can monitor simultaneously and continuously thousands of times more protein-binding events than any of the existing sensor. Furthermore, the new sensor is able to detect interactions with greater sensitivity and deliver the results significantly faster than the present gold standard method.

The use of magnetic nanotags attached to the protein being studied greatly increases the sensitivity of the monitoring. Further, the analytic model that the researchers have developed enables them to predict accurately the final outcome of an interaction based on only a few minutes of monitoring data.