Aphios
Corporation Granted United States Patent for Fractionation
of Biologically-Derived Materials
June
03, 2003
— Aphios
Corporation was granted United States Patent No. 6,569,640
on May 27, 2003 for Method for Fractionation of Biologically-Derived
Materials.
In
the fractionation process, supercritical and near-critical
fluids with/without cosolvents (SuperFluids™) are first used to remove
extracellular compounds from biologically-derived materials
such as microbial, viral and terrestrial plant cells and
then to disrupt these cells. The disrupted cells are then
step-wise extracted with increasingly polar SuperFluids™ solvents to rapidly fractionate
and isolate the intracellular constituents into partially
purified, polarity-guided fractions.
The
SuperFluids™ critical fluid extraction
and fractionation (CXF) process enhances the drug
discovery process – firstly, by rapidly producing partially-purified
natural product molecules and secondly, by enhancing the
probability of “clean” hits. CXF produces
a unique spectrum of secondary metabolites, reduces interference
from nuisance compounds and minimizes background noise in
sensitive molecular assays. The CXF technology (process
and apparatus) has been automated for high throughput fractionation
of biologically-derived materials such as marine organisms
and terrestrial plants. Aphios is currently utilizing this
platform technology to develop novel antiviral and anticancer
therapeutics from marine organisms and terrestrial plants.
Research
leading to the development of this U.S. Patent was partially
funded by SBIR grants from the National Science Foundation,
and an Advance Technology Program (ATP) Cooperative Agreement
award from the National Institute of Standards and Technology
(NIST), U.S. Department of Commerce.
Aphios
(www.aphios.com) is
a biopharmaceutical company that is developing enhanced
natural therapeutics for health maintenance and the treatment
of human diseases with a focus on infectious diseases, cancer
and quality-of-life medicines. Aphios’ product pipeline
includes therapeutics from medicinal plants and marine organisms,
and improved drug delivery formulations of small anticancer
molecules and large protein macromolecules that are crucial
to the functioning of the human genome.
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