DigiRead

Project "DigiRead" data sheet

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 Project objective

This project will serve to evaluate market opportunities of a newly invented technology for digital detection of reporter DNA strands in protein analysis. The purpose of my ongoing ERC project ProteinSeq is to develop technology and reagents for parallel, sensitive and specific targeted protein analyses in plasma samples, lysates, etc. An important limiting factor for the broader adoption of our technology is the cost and throughput of next generation sequencing and realtime PCR to read out the identities and levels of reporter DNA strands that reflect the amounts of proteins in a sample. In the course of the ERC project we have invented and patented a technique to greatly enhance each of the reporter strands to prominent DNA objects that can be easily detected, identified and counted by fluorescence microscopy with automated image analysis or through flow cytometry. We refer to this highly specific technique as super rolling circle amplification or sRCA, and it involves two generations of RCA and combinatorial fluorescence detection of the large products, each composed of hundreds of thousand repeats of specific tag DNA sequences. In the proposed PoC project we will position our new technology against other readout techniques such as next gen sequencing, realtime PCR and microarrays by identifying Needs, Approach, Benefits, Competition for sRCA. Potential end users will be contacted to establish customer requirements, and we will evaluate freedom to operate and the extent of monopoly for our invention. We will also specifically investigate means to distinguish many sRCA products by combinatorial labeling schemes.