Research Projects and Collaborations
Paraytec is a UK based scientific instrument company which develops high performance specialist detectors for the analytical and life sciences instrumentation market.
In addition to the continued development of our specialist detectors, we have also been working with various partners to apply our intellectual property to a number of healthcare applications including:
- Paraytec is working with the University of Sheffield to develop a rapid optical measurement test for the identification of the pandemic pathogen, COVID-19. The development of a sensitive, specific and fast test for COVID-19 has been demonstrated in a clinical study at Sheffield Teaching Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust. We also believe that the platform that has been created for the fast, sensitive and specific test for COVID-19 can be easily and quickly adapted to be a test for a variety of other virus and bacterial infections. For further information about our optical measurement test: Click Here
- The company’s IP in measurement techniques has also been applied to the detection and monitoring of bladder cancer from urine samples. This work is being carried out in partnership with the University of Sheffield. A prototype instrument was tested with ‘live’ samples, provided by bladder cancer patients undergoing treatment for their condition, and it was concluded that further enhancements to the selectivity of the test method were needed. These enhancements are now being developed after which further testing is planned. It is anticipated that this work will result in the development of a point-of-care instrument for the diagnosis and monitoring of bladder cancer from urine samples.
- In 2021 Paraytec completed a grant funded project (AD Scanner) to deploy its ActiPix™ technology in the field of Alzheimer’s disease (AD) diagnosis, working with a pan-European consortium of Karolinska Institute, Biomotif, Vrije University Medical Centre Amsterdam and MS Vision. The instrument used capillary isoelectric focusing (cIEF), together with ActiPix™technology, to identify the level of protein biomarkers (abnormal proteoforms) in blood samples. If present, these abnormal proteoforms are indicative of the likely rate of mental decline for a given AD patient. This is important because such information could be used by clinicians in early diagnosis to differentiate AD patients from those with mild cognitive impairment, and also by researchers to help develop better drugs to counter this devastating disease. Through this collaboration, Paraytec now has access to leading European groups with access to a bank of test plasma and cerebrospinal fluidsamples from AD patients. It is anticipated that use of the CX300 fluorescence instrument will give six orders of magnitude enhancement in sensitivity relative to the previously-used ActiPix D200 UV absorbance detector, and become competitive with single-molecule array technology.
- In 2020 we completed a programme of work in a project entitled “Towards a condensed platform for aggregation profiling”. Other partners in the consortium were Malvern Panalytical, CPI, UCLan, AstraZeneca, Fujifilm Diosynth Biotechnologies and GSK, with funding support provided by Innovate UK. Paraytec’s detector technology was incorporated into a prototype miniaturized instrument designed to characterise critical quality attributes of therapeutic proteins and virus like particles (VLPs) that are used to deliver new gene therapy drugs. Results have been disseminated at national and international conferences, and a poster is available here. The work has informed our current strategy on detection of protein aggregation measurement, and the development of an instrument which meets end-user needs in upstream processing of AAVs and VLPs.