Home / YCharOS – Antibody Characterization Through Open Science – From Viruses to Human Proteins
YCharOS – Antibody Characterization Through Open Science – From Viruses to Human Proteins
Generating solutions
Status
Competition
Genome Centre(s)
GE3LS
Project Leader(s)
- Peter S. McPherson,
- Montreal Neurological Institute and Department of Anatomy and Cell Biology, McGill University
Fiscal Year Project Launched
Project Description
Commercially available antibodies are key reagents in laboratory research with global sales estimated to be $2-3 billion USD. However, despite the size of the market and the importance of the product there is no independent, state-of-the-art quality assessment body for antibodies and as a result at least half of the antibodies on the market do not perform as required – leading to billions of dollars of wasted funding and a crisis of experimental reproducibility. YCharOS has developed a standardized process that involves knockout cell lines that do not express the target protein. With these cell lines as controls, and with inventive characterization steps, antibody performance against the cognate target protein can be quantified and compared in a range of commercially relevant applications. The long-term business model involves customers such as research organizations, funding agencies or charities paying YCharOS to perform antibody studies on protein targets selected by one of the customers with a goal of attaining $9M in annual revenue by the end of the project and saving Canadian taxpayers $45M annually by enabling our scientists to order the right antibody for their experiments.