Abstract

Enabling Urine Biomarker Discovery

Shannon Pendergrast, Chief Scientific Officer, Ymir Genomics

The discovery of urinary extra-cellular biomarkers has been impeded by the lack of efficient methods for the isolation of extra-cellular vesicles (exosomes and microvesicles), protein, and nucleic acid.  Ultracentrifugation, considered the gold standard for vesicle isolation from many biofluids, is efficacious but laborious, and like most commercially available methods, is unable to consistently isolate enough quality material from small volumes of urine for protein or RNA-based biomarker discovery.  Ymir Genomics has invented a novel precipitation reagent that rapidly and efficiently isolates extra-cellular biomolecules and vesicles from urine samples yielding a quantity suitable for biomarker discovery.  Ymirite is more efficient than either ultracentrifugation or commercial precipitation methods for isolating extra-cellular nucleic acids and vesicles from a variety of urine samples as evaluated by immunoblot, Nanosight, Electron Microscopy, miRNA microarray, and qRT-PCR. Moreover, unlike all other methods, our reagent was able to isolate vesicles from very dilute samples. Ymir Genomic’s Precipitation Reagent offers a method that, in less than 30 minutes, isolates intact extra-cellular vesicles, protein and RNA suitable for biomarker discovery from urine samples.