May 2020 News

      As every other company we have been affected over the last couple of months by the Covid-19 situation. However we continue to do essential work with reduced hours and remain open for business. We have been shipping to our various OEM partners as before, and, since the receiving departments of many university, company and research institutes are closed down we can and have been shipping to researchers home addresses. We have also initiated some SARS-CoV-2 related research which will result in some new products, including recombinant forms of the cell binding domain of the major coat protein of the SARS-CoV-2 virus PROT-SARS-CoV2-bd and the extracellular domain of the angiotensin converting enzyme 2 (ACE2), now known to be where the SARS-CoV-1 and SARS-CoV-2 viruses bind to the surface of human cells, PROT-ACE2-bd. This binding interaction is essential for virus internalization and infectivity so that antibodies and other reagents that interfere with this specific interface are of great potential clinical interest. We also add more data on the properties and utility of our older products. For example we have epitope mapped our widely used monoclonal antibody to UCHL1 MCA-BH7 and now show that our chicken antibody to tyrosine hydroxylase CPCA-TH can be used to isolate TH positive PBMCs by fluorescent cell sorting. For details of this see Gopinath et al. (2020), another EnCor/academia collaborative study.