Sumitomo Bakelite Co., Ltd.
TOPICS

February 20, 2001
SUMITOMO BAKELITE CO., LTD.

Protein Nona-adsorbent Devices

SUMITOMO BAKELITE CO., LTD. (Headquarters: at 2-5-8 Higashi Shinagawa, Shinagawa ward, Tokyo; Tsuneo Moriya, President) has developed vessels, plates and devices (protein non-adsorbent devices) with a surface where the adsorption of proteins will not occur, preventing such adsorption problem which, otherwise, would often appear during structural and functional analysis of proteins in conventional vessels, plates and devices used in the biotech field.

Societal Background

Marked progress has been made in biochemical fields like clinical diagnostics and drug discovery to clarify the functions of proteins and assay drugs base on and keeping pace with the advance of genomic sequencing and information data obtained thereby.
To process such enormous amounts of information obtained by sequencing a technology ensuring a high speed and high precision analysis of a very small amount of natural substances is essential.
Thus, various machines and apparatus as well as methods have been invented and developed as novel systems for such analysis, wherein the precision and sensitivity of such machines have been improved a lot to meet the requirement.

Nevertheless, as far as the vessels, plates and devices in contact with living substances are concerned, we are still using classical materials chosen from their transparency and moldability, such as polystyrene and polypropylene, where no remarkable progress is found since the transition in the past from glass to plastics.
While organic substances existing in vivo, such as proteins, may be stable therein, their structure and functions are vulnerable to substantial alteration and damage in vitro when picked up into contact with plates or onto devices as foreign matters due to the adsorption of the substances to vessels, plates and devices.
Moreover, such physical influences as on the changes in concentration and loss of proteins due to the adsorption, came to be not negligible, vital hindrance of analytical research along with the finer amount of proteins to be handled.
Higher speed and higher sensitivity of analytical systems are bigger drivers for us to motivate the development of next-generation devices which have intelligent surface controlling over protein adsorption, since such new systems will apparently meet with serious difficulties of traditional vessels, and devices.

Brief description of the developed devices.
Device products employing protein non-adsorbent surface treatment technology developed so far are lined up in the assortments of:
cryogenic preservation tubes, preservation/ diluting purpose 96-well deep-well plate, 96-well multi-well plate for colorimetry, 96-well multi-well plate for fluorescent/luminescent analysis. We are supposed to increase the application areas further to various other kinds of vials, dishes, devices and apparatus.


Key Technology
The adsorption ratio of proteins onto the surfaces of conventional plastic vessels and devices is measured as high as about 30%.max of the total amount, namely, 30% of proteins within a protein solution in contact therewith was lost due to the adsorption.
On the other hand the protein non-adsorbent surface developed allowed to reduce the figure to a "non-adsorbent" level of less than 1/1000 of conventional plastic vessels and devices even after a long time contact. Such tremendous features can be exhibited for all types of proteins.

The main features of our protein non-adsorbent products are as follows:

1.Preservation vessels: Prevent deactivation and metamorphosis during preservation of the proteins ensuring long-term, stable preservation .
2.Diluting vessels: Inhibit the changes in concentration due to adsorption while ensuring accurate dilution as expected theoretically.
3.Measuring vessels: Minimize the reduction of signals and generation of noises due to adsorption ensuring the high-sensitivity & high-precision analysis.

In fact Protein non-adsorbent devices did not existed in this world as available materials to date. For that reason no discussions were made among researchers on the bad influence of the adsorption, despite the adverse testing conditions under which they are actually forced to carry out the analysis.
The protein non-adsorbent products allow to realize the analysis and research in-vitro in nearly the same conditions as in-vivo environments.
We can assure you that this will become an essential material in research and analysis in bio-related fields.
Eventually aiming to apply this technology to all kinds of vessels, plates and devices for use in preserving, handling and treating proteins, peptides and DNA., we will explore possibilities for further product improvement and development .

Thank you.