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Marine Biotech Company GlycoMar Developing New In House Screening Services
Posted On: January 11, 2008OBAN life science company GlycoMar Ltd has recently announced an additional service has been introduced at its in
house screening facility. GlycoMar Managing Director Dr Charlie Bavington set up the Company in 2005, to exploit the potential of sugar-based compounds derived from marine invertebrates. GlycoMar has continued to expand its commercial success since 2005, when it made the headlines by extracting chemicals from starfish slime to combat allergies such as hay fever.
Dr Bavington said ”The addition of further screening assays is part of our on going strategy to develop the screening facility. This will allow us to increase income and provide vital capabilities for our own drug discovery program. The introduction of anti-oxidant assays compliments our already established anti-inflammatory screens.”
GlycoMar’s newly introduced assay is used to screen compounds for their ability to inhibit ROS/RNS production, so acting as an antioxidant and blocking downstream inflammatory events. The assay is a fully quantitative assay offering low – medium throughput. GlycoMar is also developing an in house mixed lymphocyte assay which will be commercially available early 2008.
Surplus Jellyfish Seen as Additive Source
Posted On: January 11, 2008In recent years populations of jellyfish have been exploding, which may present the food and cosmetics industries
with interesting new additives.Writing in the Journal of Natural Products, researchers from the Institute of Physical and Chemical Research in Saitama, and Shimva Chemical Industries in Kyoto, describe a process for extracting high yields of a protein substance called mucin that could be used as a starting material for production of designer mucins with multiple uses. The researchers investigated the extraction from five species of jellyfish of a novel glycoprotein, a member of the mucin family. The yields, ranging from one to three per cent of dry weight, and 0.02 to 0.1 per cent of wet weight, were classified as high. The extracted polymeric substance from all of the species formed a gel in aqueous solution. The researchers have labeled this substance, which is common in jellyfish and similar to the human mucin MUC5AC, “qniumucin” and have suggested the utilization of this compound as a new marine resource, based on the present commercial use of gastric mucin from porcine stomachs and bovine submaxillary glands, towards and potential for use in food and cosmetics.
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