Genetic Engineering & Biotechnology News (GEN) is published 21 times a year by Mary Ann Liebert Inc., publishers.
Hercules, CA, and New Rochelle, NY, September 16, 2010-Bio-Rad Laboratories, Inc. and Genetic Engineering & Biotechnology News (GEN) today announced that Simon Cocklin, Ph.D., a scientist at the Drexel University College of Medicine, has won a ProteOn™ XPR36 protein interaction array system from Bio-Rad in the ProteOn XPR36 Giveaway Program, a recent scientific research proposal competition. Bio-Rad and GEN co-sponsored the contest in which applicants submitted proposals detailing how they would use the ProteOn XPR36 system in their research and what problems or challenges they anticipated the system would help solve. Dr. Cocklin submitted his winning research proposal on novel research applications for surface plasmon resonance (SPR) technology.
"I am ecstatic and thrilled to have been chosen as the winner as I have been trying to increase the SPR capability at Drexel University for the past three years," Dr. Cocklin said. The title of his research proposal was "Small-Molecule Inhibitors of HIV-1 Replication."
"My research focuses on the discovery of small-molecule inhibitors against previously unexploited targets in HIV such as components of the Gag polyprotein," explained Dr. Cocklin. "My collaborators and I have discovered some novel compounds that target the matrix and capsid regions of Gag which display antiviral activity. We are interested in using SPR to define structure-affinity relationships."
Dr. Cocklin has several roles at Drexel. At the college's Protein Analysis Core Facility, he is both Director of the Protein Production/Purification Facility, and Co-Director of the Protein-Protein Interaction Facility.
"This award reinforces GEN's and Bio-Rad's commitment and mission to support and facilitate scientific discoveries," said Joan Boyce, Group Publisher of GEN. "We congratulate Dr. Cocklin on his winning submission. We are delighted that Dr. Cocklin and his colleagues will have access to the ProteOn XPR36 system and that it will play such an important role in furthering their research."
"To my knowledge the ProteOn XPR36 Giveaway Program is the first industry competition to award such a high-value prize solely on the basis of scientific merit," said Jill Raymond, Marketing Manager for Bio-Rad." The program and award demonstrate Bio-Rad's long-standing commitment to scientific discovery and the company's leadership in new analytical technologies. We are excited to be a part of Dr. Cocklin's future discoveries in small molecules."
Having experience with other SPR instruments, Dr. Cocklin said he particularly liked the ProteOn XPR36 protein interaction array system for its ease of use and because it allows researchers to look at a greater number of molecular interactions than other SPR instruments used in his lab.
"One of the main advantages of the ProteOn XPR36 system is that it gives you the ability to obtain a full kinetic dataset in just one injection," he pointed out. "This obviates the need to try to scout the regeneration conditions, which is often the key bottleneck in SPR studies."
Dr. Cocklin noted that in addition to using the instrument in his own lab, he plans to make it available to other researchers at the College of Medicine.
