Functional Analysis of Individual Disease Biology
Relative to other approaches that interrogate more upstream biology at the DNA or RNA level, Nodality's Single Cell Network Profiling (SCNP) is unique in that it focuses on protein function in living cells. Molecular changes in complex conditions such as cancer and autoimmune diseases can alter the basic architecture of cell signaling networks. These changes cannot necessarily be revealed by analyzing DNA, RNA, or protein sequence. Cell proteins perform most cellular functions, make up cell architecture, and represent the majority of drug targets; modifications that occur only at the protein level are often critical in disease pathways and have a significant impact on each patient's individual response (or lack thereof) to therapy.
SCNP measures external proteins and internal cell signaling networks at the protein level, both before and after modulation with external factors including chemokines, growth factors, and small molecule or biological therapeutics. This approach reveals perturbations in network signaling properties that are typically not observed in resting cells. Using SCNP, Nodality can identify the biologic heterogeneity and therefore the therapeutic activity in a variety of diseases.
SCNP's ability to analyze cells individually is critical to identifying which cell subtype demonstrates the biologically relevant phenotype of interest. This has three main advantages. First, SCNP allows quantification of biological effects between cell types, allowing determination of biological signaling activities in relevant cells. Second, information from cells is captured independently; in other approaches, this information can be obscured when signal from the rare cell type of interest is diluted with signal from non-rare cell types. Third, SCNP uniquely allows the study hundreds of thousands or millions of cells from tissue to identify rare cells of interest.
SCNP's simultaneous measurement of multiple proteins in each cell as well as multiple cells per sample creates enormous quantities of data. Nodality's strong bioinformatics and biostatistics team has developed the critical expertise necessary to analyze this data and discriminate significant information from noise, allowing efficient and high value, high content, and high throughput analysis.
Nodality's Proprietary Platform: Single Cell Network Profiling (SCNP)
