CIL partners to provide more isotope-labeled proteins to pharma
Explaining the partnership, Kevin Millis, product manager for CIL, said, “We’ve had a long relationship with Nexomics, there’s not many people we know of that make labeled proteins for a living and very few companies that can do this.”
Boston-based CIL, the world’s leading supplier of stable isotopes and stable isotope-enriched small molecules, and Nexomics will help researchers address a growing demand in stable-isotope-enriched protein reagents by producing and offering catalog and custom isotope-enriched proteins.
“We make the reagents and media that the [Nexomics’] e.Coli eat,” Millis added, noting that CIL has operations around the world, covering all of the large pharmaceutical companies, with operations in Germany and several manufacturing sites in Ohio and Canada.
“It’s a fairly mature field that’s been going on for a couple of decades,” Millis said. “But there’s always new labeling patterns and new techniques…we have the reagents to create different types of protein labeling for all proteins and large proteins, which require more esoteric labeling.”
"Nexomics success in developing techniques to determine protein structure using Nuclear Magnetic Resonance (NMR) spectroscopy nicely complements CIL's mission to offer isotope enriched reagents used to produce labeled recombinant protein. The capabilities that Nexomics offers, such as the production and NMR analysis of isotope-enriched protein, will enhance and expand CIL's current product offering," says Joel Bradley, CEO of Cambridge Isotope Laboratories.
The agreement was born after Gaetano Montelione, CEO of Nexomics Biosciences, contacted CIL. Montelione “is a famous guy,” Millis added, noting that his company can do “many types of stable-isotope labeling,” which if it doesn’t go well, “can get messy” because “every protein is different and people have to figure out what stable isotope labeling is appropriate. We have the expertise in preparing the required reagents.”
