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By Veena Venkatachalam
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• Neurons – cells that make up our nervous systems
• have processes that transmit electrical impulses (action potentials)
• this is how your brain communicates with the rest of your body
• neurodegenerative diseases cause these neurons to die
• basic fibroblast growth factor (bFGF) promotes neuron survival
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• bFGF – growth factor that stimulates elongation and branching of neuronal processes
• Why don’t we use bFGF to treat patients with Alzheimer’s or Parkinson’s disease? It degrades too rapidly!
• Solution – find a stable substance that has bFGF-like effects
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• Antibodies – Y-shaped proteins that are produced by cells of the immune system in response to a stimulus; protect us by neutralizing toxins
• four chains – two heavy chains and two light chains
• each chain has one variable region; variable regions differentiate antibodies from one other and determine specificity
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• We have hypothesized, based on past observations, that serum from several patients contains an antibody that has effects similar to those of bFGF
bFGF (neurotrophic growth factor)
Complementary
Anti-idiotype (bFGF-like
antibody; similar antigen binding
site)
Idiotype (antibody complementary to
bFGF)
Complementary
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• We used three different methods to purify the patient serum:
Protein A beads: pour serum over column and elute with citric acid; result => only
IgGs
Protein A
beads: bind IgGs
Hydroxy-apatite
gel
Hydroxyapatite (HA) column: pour protein A
eluate over column, elute w/ diff. molarities of sodium phosphate
Immunoaffinity column: has anti-bFGF antibodies bound to
the protein A beads; thus, bFGF like antibodies bind very
strongly. Elute w/ diff. pH
Immuno-affinity column
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• Bioactivity assays were used to determine the fraction that we wanted to purify further
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pH fractions from IA column: bioassay
100.00%
110.00%
120.00%
130.00%
140.00%
150.00%
160.00%
Control pH 3.3 pH 3.0 pH 2.8 pH 2.65 pH 2.3
pe
rce
nt
of
con
tro
l
0
0.01
0.02
0.03
0.04
0.05
0.06
0.07
0.08
0.09
0.1
pro
tein
co
nce
ntr
atio
n (
mg
/mL
)
bioactivity (endothelial cell assay) protein conc
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I’d like to extend my deepest appreciation to Dr. Zimering for his guidance. I would also like to thank Robert Donnelly for his help in running
mass spectroscopy and amino acid sequencing our samples.