Intellectual Property

Significant inventions include:

1. “Methods for Simplifying Microbial Nucleic Acid by Chemical Modification of Cytosines” encompasses the diagnosis of pathogen presence using nucleic acid simplification. This invention is of particular use for the detection of pathogens that comprise more than one strain of the disease bearing organism, such as Human Papilloma Virus (HPV) of which more than 13 high risk strains have been implicated in the progression to cervical cancer.  Others include Influenza, rotaviruses, HIV, HepC. 

1. ‘Isothermal Amplification’ - describes a new method for the multiplication of DNA at a single constant temperature, potentially providing an alternative to PCR. 

1. ‘Assay for health state’ which couples the bisulphite treatment of methylated nucleic acid with cellular DNA methylation profiling, which has important ramifications for diagnosis and prognosis of disease states such as cancer.

• ‘Treatment of methylated nucleic acid’ - this invention relates to HGS’ proprietary technique of treating DNA with a bisulphite reagent, without significant loss of starting DNA material, for the purpose of identifying methylation patterns.  From this HGS has created a bisulphite treatment kit called ‘MethylEasy TM’.