Procognia acquires Sense Proteomic to aid drug discovery

UK biopharmaceutical company Procognia, based in Maidenhead, has acquired Sense Proteomic to help advance its mission to create a suite of technological solutions for the drug discovery, development and manufacturing industries. Procognia has developed integrated, rapid glycoanalysis technologies to increase the probability of success of biopharmaceutical products.

The glycosylation of biopharmaceutical products is one of the most difficult manufacturing processes to control, with analysis of the glycosylation pattern usually a lengthy process requiring several highly trained scientists. Procognia technology is an automated process that can perform glycoanalysis in a few hours. The ability to perform 'real time' analysis of the patterns during clone selection and optimisation, process development, manufacture and QC, has the potential to improve greatly both the number and quality of biologic drugs.

Sense's technology complements and will expand Procognia's technology suite by adding functional protein array capability. The technology integrates the cloning, expression and protein capture/purification of functionally folded proteins in arrays of numerous formats that include mass spectrometry and fluorescence. Because the arrays can be prepared from almost any family of proteins, the technology significantly expands the primary and secondary screening of both biologic and small molecules for therapeutic benefit, toxicity and diagnostics.

The scientific founder of Sense Proteomic, Dr Jonathan Blackburn, will become Procognia's chief scientist and will join chief executive Ron Long, Johanna Griffin, Yeshayahu Yakir and Chris Lyddon as members of the company's executive team.