EnCor Biotechnology Inc.

04/22/2024

Just reading "The Codebreaker" by Walter Isaacson, excellent book, and this made me laugh. Page 241, all-Important business maxim: Don't fight about divvying up the proceeds until you finish robbing the stagecoach.

04/11/2023

So we published a peer-reviewed paper describing how the widely used neurofilament light (NF-L) biomarker assays work. This work had some interesting and surprising features, allowing us to develop a panel of antibodies which specifically bind degraded forms of NF-L. For the paper see; https://doi.org/10.1093/braincomms/fcad067

For the Readers Digest version go here;
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qkxDKyh2xUk&t=52s

Read the paper: Gerry Shaw, Irina Madorsky, Ying Li, YongSheng Wang, Marda Jorgensen, Sabhya Rana, David D Fuller, Uman type neurofilament light antibodies a...

12/18/2020

Well we started to use some more sophisticated labeling techniques, to produce images of more than three colors, which is what we did up to now. Below is an image of HeLa cells, human carcinoma cells the subject of some controversy since the cells were derived without consent from an African American, Henrietta Lacks, and until fairly recently her family was not informed or compensated in any way. The image below is now on Wikipedia and shows HeLa cells stained with a mouse tubulin antibody to reveal cytoplasmic microtubules in green, a rabbit antibody to fibrillarin in red, revealing nucleoli, a chicken antibody to HSP60 revealing mitochondria in yellow and the DNA dye DAPI showing the nuclei in magenta. See

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HeLa #/media/File:HeLa-Tubulin-HSP60-Fibrillarin-DNA.jpg

01/30/2020

We just published a very strange paper in collaboration with a group of researchers in Europe. A few years ago archaeologists excavated a pit in Heslington, near York, England and found a severed human head which was dated at 2,600 years before present. The original owner of the head had presumably been executed or sacrificed for some reason, this apparently happened a lot in pre-Roman Britain. The head contained a surprisingly well preserved although shrunken brain. Interestingly many brain proteins were also well preserved while DNA preservation was poor. EnCor in collaboration with a group of European scientists showed that tissue from this brain was able to elicit immune response to two important brain proteins, GFAP and MBP, indicating that these proteins were surprisingly stable and still immunogenic over more than two and a half millennia. These findings were confirmed using mass spectroscopy, and other experiments showed that many other brain proteins were partially preserved. The paper was just published in the Journal of the Royal Society Interface, see below. The report has already generated considerable media interest, just do a Google search for "2,600 year old brain".

Human proteins have not been reported to survive in free nature, at ambient temperature, for long periods. Particularly, the human brain rapidly dissolves after death due to auto-proteolysis and pu...

11/02/2019

So we went to Chicago again for the big old Society for Neuroscience meeting, October 2019. As usual people were interested in our various free pens, flashlights, postcards and stuff. This time we gave our smaller posters away for free, giving out thousands of them, also gave out a lot of free antibody samples. Here is Steve with a nice dog visitor, not one of ours. Fun but hard work!