Providing Better Immunology Tools For Better Healthcare  ::  

Technology

Pure Protein has patented a groundbreaking method of producing substantial amounts of soluble HLA (sHLA) in various human and animal cell lines. This method generates highly purified material without the need to lyse cells or to do extensive downstream purification. Pure Protein’s HLA products facilitate epitope and protein discovery in cancerous and pathogen targeted cell lines.

HLA proteins serve as molecular fingerprints for the immune system to distinguish self from non-self. The enormous diversity of this class of proteins is important to the proper functioning of immunity, but this characteristic also makes studying this system an equally enormous task. Organ transplantation and autoimmune disease, and vaccine development are key areas of interest for HLA screening and research. Providing a source of highly purified individual HLA proteins is critical to each of these important areas of work.

  • MOVIE #1: Class I presented peptides indicate viral infection and cancerous transformation
  • MOVIE #2: Identifying class I peptide epitopes unique to infected or cancerous cells

Advantages of our sHLAs are:

  1. Other HLA production methods involve lysis of cells followed by extensive purification, which can be laborious and often still does not yield highly purified protein. Pure Protein’s sHLA preparations are comprised of single specificity proteins.
  2. Our sHLA proteins are produced in mammalian cells so that they are correctly glycosylated and folded for human applications.
  3. Because we use a recombinant form of HLA that requires minimal downstream purification, we are able to produce the protein in large quantities (tens of milligrams).
  4. We are able to produce any Class HLA regardless of the genomic DNA.

Pure Protein is also developing a method for producing highly purified Class II HLA proteins.

In addition to HLA reagents, Pure Protein also provides analytical services to verify peptide binding and loading quality of FACS staining reagents such as dimers and tetramers.

For more information on our sHLA technology, download the Pure Protein datasheet or contact us.