Toppan and Dai Nippon Toryo have announced that they have executed a patent licensing agreement for the use of Toppan’s extracellular vesicle (exosome1) detection technology using immunochromatography.
The agreement provides a non-exclusive license to use the patent for Toppan’s technology in the design, development, fabrication, and sale of DNT’s Exorapid-qIC Immunochromatography Kit for Extracellular Vesicles. Toppan hopes the use of its technology will contribute to advancing techniques for early diagnosis and preventive medicine.
DNT exhibited Exorapid-qIC for the first time at the 10th Academic Meeting of the Japanese Society for Extracellular Vesicles on 23 and 24 October.
Cancer continues to be the leading cause of death in Japan, and in recent years, greater importance has been placed on cancer prevention as well as on early testing and diagnosis. It has been discovered that exosomes, a type of extracellular vesicle generated and released by human cells, contain information about the cells from which they originate, and that they are present in blood, urine, and many other body fluids. There are now high expectations for the development of simple testing technologies that detect exosomes in body fluids to support early diagnosis of cancer, dementia, and other diseases.
In addressing this, Toppan has applied its liquid biopsy3 exosome detection method to develop an exosome detection technology using immunochromatography. Toppan is providing its immunochromatography exosome detection technology for DNT to use in the design, development, fabrication, and sale of testing and reagent kits for experiments and research on exosomes.
DNT has its own synthesizing technologies for the fabrication of disk and rod-shaped anisotropic noble metal nanoparticles (gold nanorods and nanoplates, silver nanoplates, etc.) and is working with its partner companies to expand the use of such technologies into the life science field. DNT has been able to combine gold nanoplates with antibodies that bind specific pathogens, and by using Toppan’s technology, has developed Exorapid-qIC.
Future development
Through the use of technology based on the patent, Toppan aims to contribute to work by research institutions on next-generation modalities4 for drug discovery using extracellular vesicles, and to drive the development of new detection technologies. Toppan will also advance research into new diagnostic technologies for the medical field to satisfy unmet medical needs.
