Sumitomo Bakelite Co., Ltd. will launch “BlotGlyco O-Glycan Sample Preparation Kit”, a breakthrough new product that enables scientists to analyze O-glycans in biological samples, including biotherapeutic glycoproteins, in a simple, safe and streamlined operation. This new product will be launched simultaneously in Japan and United States1 in late May 2015.

The kit is a valuable tool supporting customers involved in glycoprotein characterization in research and process development, monitoring and batch release, and characterization of previously unattainable information on O-glycan structures.

Glycans are sugar chains composed of linear and/or branched sequences of several carbohydrates. Changes in glycosylation are often a hallmark of disease states such as cancers, virus infection, etc. Characterizing the changes in glycosylation associated with cancer and chronic inflammation can lead to new therapeutic and diagnostic strategies.

In biotherapeutics development, such as antibody drugs, it has been shown that glycans influence their yield, efficacy, immunogenicity and stability of the biotherapeutic agent.

Glycans usually exist as a component of glycoconjugates such as glycoproteins and glycolipids, in other words, glycans are attached to another class of biomolecules, i.e. proteins, lipids, etc. Glycans on glycoproteins, in general, are classified as N-glycans or O-glycans2 according to their attachment site in proteins. For the detailed analysis of glycans, researchers need to isolate glycans with an appropriate method for characterization.

Sumitomo Bakelite Co., Ltd. has developed the new tool that enables safe and straightforward O-glycan sample preparation. The kit consists of “O-glycan release reagent” and “BlotGlyco3 glycan purification and labeling beads”. O-Glycan release reagent is based on chemical treatment of protein samples with an ammonium salt that is far innocuous than conventional methods and effective for unbiased mild O-glycan release from glycoproteins.

Since the released O-glycans with the kit carry the reducing terminal that is available for further modification, the O-glycans can be further purified and labeled using BlotGlyco beads, also enclosed in the kit. Thus, the kit enables researchers to recover O-glycans with the tag of the user’s choice depending on analytical method, such as HPLC/UPLC, LC-MS, MALDI-TOF MS, CE/CE-LIF analysis.

The new product “BlotGlyco O-Glycan Sample Preparation Kit” will be an accessible tool for safe and simple O-glycan analysis, which is readily applicable for screening and quality control of biotherapeutics process development as well as biomarker discovery and regenerative medicine research.

The product will be available in the US through S-BIO, Vaupell Holdings Inc.,  a Sumitomo Bakelite Co., Ltd. group company. S-BIO also offers BlotGlyco Purification and labeling Kit for N-glycan sample preparation. In Japan, Sumitomo Bakelite Co., Ltd. markets the new product.