Launch of BioLynx provides a boost for the international malaria research community
New NUS spin-off company launches at TechVenture 2011
As part of a NUS research project, Dr Martin Lear and Dr Kevin Tan successfully tagged a fluorescent marker to chloroquine, a drug that has been used in the treatment of malaria since 1947. The fluorescent-labelled chloroquine molecule, known as LynxTag–CQTM, demonstrates the same biological activity as normal chloroquine. Due to the fluorescent tagging, researchers can now visualise intracellular drug-cell interactions, in an easy and cost-effective manner. Malaria researchers will find LynxTag–CQTM a useful research tool for studying topics, such as chloroquine resistance, drug uptake, mechanism of drug action, or chemo-sensitization.
“We already validated LynxTag-CQTM as a research tool for malaria research. In addition, we believe it has greater potential and can be used to study mechanisms of other diseases at a cellular level. For example, chloroquine is also used in treating immune diseases, cancer and some viral infections. Moving forward, we plan to go beyond just chloroquine, to have a pipeline of products, synthesizing chemical tags for other high value drugs,” said Dr Kevin Tan, Director (Biology) and co-founder of BioLynx, and an Assistant Professor at the NUS Yong Loo Lin School of Medicine.
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