Nautilus Biotechnology has announced Baylor College of Medicine as the first customer of the early access program for its proteomics technology. As part of the program, Baylor will use Nautilus’ single-molecule proteomics method to develop a computational toolkit that can identify aberrant protein isoforms that contribute to tumor growth, metastasis, immune evasion, and therapeutic resistance.
Nautilus launched the Iterative Mapping Early Access Program in January this year to provide scientists with an initial opportunity to put its platform technology to the test ahead of a commercial launch slated for late 2026. At the core of the EAP is the company’s Voyager™ proteomics platform which combines integrated reagents, fluidics, imaging, ultra-dense nano-array flow cells, and machine learning algorithms to power the iterative mapping of up to 10 billion intact proteins and proteoforms in a single run.
Nautilus officially unveiled the platform in February during the US Human Proteome Organization (US HUPO) meeting in St. Louis, Missouri. The debut followed what the company described as the “successful installation and field testing” of the platform at the Buck Institute for Research on Aging, where the platform was used to elucidate tau proteoform biology. At the time of the launch, the company also said that the program’s initial offering was its tau proteoforms assay, which enables quantification of up to 768 full-length tau proteoform groups that are not accessible with standard proteomics methods.
The Baylor study, which is funded by the U.S. National Institutes of Health, is led by Bing Zhang, PhD, and Yongchao Dou, PhD. They and their colleagues aim to develop a toolkit with improved detection of protein isoforms in conventional shotgun proteomics datasets. By pairing these computational approaches with full-length, isoform-resolved proteomic measurements generated on the Voyager, the project is intended to enable direct comparison of transcriptional and proteomic changes.
“Nautilus’ protein analysis platform will complement our multiomics expertise at Baylor by accurately identifying and quantifying the full diversity of protein isoforms across healthy and disease states,” said Zhang, a professor in the department of molecular and human genetics at Baylor. “The newfound ability to measure single-molecule proteins at high resolution through iterative mapping gives us an important reference that may illuminate connections between genomic and proteomic data in ways that haven’t previously been possible.”
Nautilus is continuing to accept participants for its early access program.
