FluidicMEMS @ the Venture Cafe

By Lily | Published: July 23, 2010

Terrific to see so many microfluidics people mingling with entrepreneurs and VCs at yesterday’s FluidicMEMS event at the Venture Cafe, which generously hosted our group for the evening. Over 30 FluidicMEMS folks attended from MIT, Harvard, MGH, Boston University, and Tufts as well as RainDance Technologies, Claros Diagnostics, Seventh Sense Biosystems, Schlumberger, and more.  Thanks to collaborating host Carrie Stalder of the Venture Cafe, as well as co-organizers Joost Bonsen and John Mills of MIT for helping bring this together.

The concept of the Venture Cafe is to provide a physical space for the entrepreneurial and innovation communities to interact, creating “fresh and useful conversations.” The plans are to eventually open a street-level cafe; for now the cafe is being prototyped at Tim Rowe’s Cambridge Innovation Center in Kendall Square.  As an example of the serendipitous connections that the Venture Cafe is all about, the FluidicMEMS group overlapped with Bain Capital Ventures and editors from Xconomy to make for an especially fascinating evening.   The cafe is open Thursdays from 3-8 pm — check out their blog to see who will be in the cafe each week!

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CIMIT Summer Education Series: Emerging Technologies for Drug Delivery

By Lily | Published: July 1, 2010

The CIMIT Summer Education Series 2010, “Emerging Technologies and Applications for Therapeutic Delivery of Drugs and Molecules” kicks off July 6th.  The entire series looks great and includes several talks related to bioMEMS/NEMS/microfluidic technology. (link to flyer)

In particular, the program on 7/13 specifically features bioMEMS, and the discussion on 7/27 is moderated by Jeffrey Borenstein who has developed a microfluidic drug delivery system for the ear.

The other talks on 7/6 and 7/20 also look fantastic and include HST Professor Jeffrey Karp and MIT Professor Bob Langer, inventor of countless drug delivery technologies which have spun out into successful companies.  Check it out!

DATE / LOCATION TITLE SPEAKERS
July 6, 20104:00 to 6:00 PM

Boston University Photonics Center
CONTROLLING CELL RESPONSES

Towards the Next Generation of Biomaterials and Chemical Approaches to Control Cellular Response

High Throughput Development of Biomaterials for Stem Cell Engineering

 Jeffrey Karp, PhD
Harvard-MIT Division of Health Sciences and Technology/MIT

Ying Mei, PhD
MIT

Moderator: Frederick Schoen, MD, PhD
BWH
July 13, 20104:00 to 6:00 PM

Boston University Photonics Center

 NOVEL DELIVERY METHODS

Nanoparticle Targeting
Micro- and Nano-MEMS Tools

 Omid Farokhzad, MD
BWH

Michael Cima, PhD
MIT

Moderator: Mark Grinstaff, PhD
Boston University
July 20, 20104:00 to 6:00 PM

Boston University Photonics Center

 INTRODUCTION TO DRUG DELIVERY: CLINICAL NEED AND TECHNOLOGICAL SPECTRUM

Clinical Needs
Drug Delivery Technology: Past, Present and Future

 David Nathan, MD
MGH

Robert Langer, ScD
MIT

Moderator: Elazer Edelman, MD, PhD
MIT
July 27, 20104:00 to 6:00 PM

Boston University Photonics Center

 CLINICAL APPLICATIONS

Novel Therapies for Cancer
Anesthesia and Critical Care Therapies

 Yolonda Colson, MD, PHD
BWH

Dan Kohane, MD, PhD
Children’s Hospital

Moderator: Jeffrey Borenstein, PhD
Charles Stark Draper Laboratory
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Helicos BioSciences: update on shift to diagnostics

By Lily | Published: July 1, 2010

Last week Helicos BioSciences posted a few more details on its shift toward diagnostics (and away from the research market) that was announced in May:

Helicos believes that the HeliScope Sequencer will have utility across a broad array of molecular diagnostic (MDx) tests. Initially, Helicos is developing a MDx test that will identify gene mutations indicative of a woman’s increased risk of developing hereditary breast or ovarian cancer. This test is currently scheduled to launch during the second quarter of 2011.

Helicos originally was shooting to be the first to deliver a $1000K genome, but given the increasingly ferocious competition in the area of low-cost sequencing, it remains to be seen what areas of the market Helicos may capture.

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Microfluidics: the new home chemistry kit?

By Lily | Published: June 28, 2010

Image credit: Cheng Wei T. Yang, Eric Ouellet and Eric T. Lagally

What’s the difference between work and play when it comes to science? Not much, sometimes. Linda Stone, upon interviewing Nobel Laureates in 2009 found:

When these men talked about their work in the lab today and their childhood play patterns, it was the same conversation.  They played passionately as children and the emergent questions and interests they had as children were still central in their work, albeit more evolved.

Eric Lagally’s group at the University of British Columbia are hoping microfluidics might inspire kids at a young age, just as home chemistry sets used to decades ago. In the May 2010 issue of Analytical Chemistry, they report on an outreach project to teach kids principles of microfluidics via devices made of Jell-O.  While these projects are proposed as school assignments, there’s no reason why a child couldn’t keep on playing with the concepts at home.

The article, which is freely available, contains detailed lesson plans and links back to the lab’s outreach website, with even more resources for educators.  Three projects are described: observing pressure-driven flow, learning about dimensionless parameters by observing laminar flow, and testing pH inside a microfluidic channel.  These can be adapted to different student levels from elementary through high school. For an advanced student, the next step could be to design a new experiment — indeed, the protocols described were initially developed by high school students, Jake Abbot and Cameron Lawson, working with the Lagally group. I’d love to see what new experiments the kids might come up with!

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FluidicMEMS event: Mehmet Fatih Yanik on high-throughput screening of whole animals

By Lily | Published: June 8, 2010

[ Javascript required to view QuickTime movie, please turn it on and refresh this page ]


Image credit: F. Zeng, C.B. Rohde, M.F. Yanik

Last night it was terrific hearing MIT Prof. Mehmet Fatih Yanik speak at the second FluidicMEMS event, sponsored by Dolomite Microfluidics and generously hosted by Microsoft New England Research and Development Center. Thanks to co-organizers Joost Bonsen of the MIT Media Lab and John Mills of MIT’s IIH for helping make the event a success!

Often when you think of biological applications of microfluidic devices, you think small: DNA, proteins, single cells. On the other end of the size spectrum, MIT Professor Mehmet Fatih Yanik’s work explores using microfluidics to efficiently experiment with whole animals such as C. elegans worms (~1 mm long) and zebrafish larvae. C. elegans and zebrafish are popular experimental animals for a variety of reasons, including low cost, sufficiently complex organ systems, and ease of imaging (young zebrafish have transparent bodies). However, performing conventional experiments using these animals is tedious and time consuming.

Enter microfluidics. Yanik’s lab-on-a-chip systems have the potential to speed up experiments on C. elegans and zebrafish ~100x. As seen in the video above, the device can move worms around, immobilize them for imaging or neurosurgery, then sort them. Yanik is creating a start-up around this technology and also spoke recently at the Early Stage Life Sciences Technology Conference in Boston where he described its commercial potential:

Product/Technology Profile
We have a technology to perform high-throughput ultra-high-content pharmaceutical screens on whole-vertebrates (zebrafish) in vivo and at cellular resolution. It allows high-throughput screening of complex phenotypes that cannot be replicated in vitro such as: organ development; neural degeneration and regeneration; stem cell proliferation and migration; cardiovascular, immune, endocrine, and nervous system functions; infectious disease progression; pathogenesis; cancer progression; and tissue specificity and toxicity of drugs. Zebrafish models of several human diseases have been already developed.

Market and Application
The potential market is the pharma industry. The size of the market is between $100 million-$1 billion.

…

Competitive Advantages
 There is no substitute for the proposed technology. Current screens on zebrafish are performed either semi-manually (100 fold slower) or the assays are overly simplistic. We will be able to offer much more sophisticated whole-animal assays at much more competitive prices.

Future Financial Plans
We need $50k for space, $150k for salaries, ~$400k for equipment. Our major milestone is to generate the first contracts with pharmaceutical companies, and to achieve screening of small to medium size compound libraries within a few weeks.

For more on Yanik’s work:

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GnuBio: Will droplet-based sequencing from the Weitz lab win the race?

By Lily | Published: June 3, 2010

Forget the $1000 genome. Forget the $100 genome. GnuBio, a new startup out of the Weitz lab at Harvard, proposed a $30 genome yesterday at the Consumer Genetics Conference in Boston.

Less than five years ago, the goal for inexpensive sequencing was $1000 per genome, the number believed to be the threshold at which doctors and insurance companies would begin adoption. Since then scads of competitors, including Illumina, Oxford Nanopore, Life Technologies, Complete Genomics, Pacific Biosciences, Helicos Biosciences (out of Stephen Quake’s lab) and others, have been racing to achieve this target. Microfluidics is a crucial component in many of these technologies for increasing throughput and reducing costs.

In the past couple years, some have even been shooting for a $100 genome. The pressure is definitely on. (A few weeks ago Helicos announced they were cutting half their staff to focus solely on the diagnostics rather than the research market.)

GnuBio’s sequencing is based on the microfluidic droplet technology out of the Weitz lab, which also produced RainDance Technologies. According to Bio-IT World:

Weitz presented some fairly provocative figures for the cost of DNA sequencing using his technology. With an estimated sequencing cost per base of just $10-9, a 30-fold human genome sequence would cost a mere $30 and take about 10 hours. “You can quibble about the details of these calculations but the orders of magnitude are not that far off. That’s what makes us want to pursue it,” said Weitz.

GnuBio seems to be moving quickly and hopes to have beta systems completed by the end of the year. There are tons of articles speculating on who will get to $100 first. Just last week, the Motley Fool speculated on investments in genome sequencing companies. Who will win the race?

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Event: Microfluidics & Nanotechnology in Drug Discovery June 23, 2010

By Lily | Published: May 29, 2010

Drug discovery and development is hard. It can easily take 15-20 years to get to market from the time a new drug is identified, and throughout that period the risk of failure is high. Even drugs that make it past most of the hurdles can end up getting dumped after 20 years of work due to unforeseen side effects or other issues.

Biotech and pharmaceutical companies have eyed microfluidic technology for a while, because of its potential for lowering development costs via high-throughput assays. However the path to adoption of microfluidics in the pharmaceutical industry remains to be seen.

On June 23rd in Manchester, UK a 1-day conference will be held on this very topic: “Microfluidics & Nanotechnology in Drug Discovery,” coordinated by the European Laboratory Robotics Interest Group (ELRIG) and supported by AstraZeneca.

This conference will draw world-class speakers from the scientific community and industrial sectors, through presentations covering compound screening, complex biology, detection, drug delivery and pre-clinical applications. This meeting will aid to catalyse the development of new application opportunities and the adoption of these advancing technologies.

The conference seems like interesting opportunity to get microfluidics researchers talking to the research market (i.e., research scientists in the pharmaceutical industry) to discuss what tools would be most useful.

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CMC Microsystems supports Canadian microfluidics R&D

By Lily | Published: May 26, 2010

If you’re in Canada and specialize in microfluidics research, development, and/or commercialization, check out CMC Microsystems.  CMC is a partnership between industry and universities to help support and develop the Canadian microsystems industry by providing services to universities (e.g., CAD tools, fabrication services) not only in microfluidics, but also general MEMS, microelectronics, and other integrated technologies.

Faculty members and graduate students depend on CMC’s services to design, manufacture and test microsystems concepts for future applications in industrial sectors.  Working with leading suppliers from across Canada and around the world, CMC offers products and services in microelectronics, MEMS, optoelectronics/photonics, microfluidics and embedded software.

In the current five-year period (2005-2010), CMC combines NSERC funding of $48.5 million with in-kind contributions from industry and added value from CMC to deliver a microsystems-centric program valued at $175 million. This program serves over 3,100 faculty members and graduate students in more than 43 universities across the country.

For microfluidics researchers specifically, CMC offers:

Primary application areas: electro-osmatics/electrophoresis flows (mixing, separation and detection), chemical analysis including DNA/blood analysis, DNA amplifications, electronics cooling

  • Design environments: CAD tools for design, (L-Edit from SoftMEMS/Tanner) and fluidic analysis with finite element analysis techniques (ANSYS)
  • Prototype manufacturing services: fabrication of networks of closed microchannels in glass substrate (Protolyne from Micralyne)
  • L-Edit/MEMSPro based technology files for Protolyne processes
  • Tutorial on Protolyne technology
  • Engineering support

To keep up on CMC Microsystems news, you can also follow them on Twitter @CMCMicrosystems, which provides updates on training and fabrication schedules, as well as links to their monthly bulletin. They also have a Facebook page and are on LinkedIn.

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Update: Microfluidics companies in Japan

By Lily | Published: May 23, 2010


View FluidicMEMS.com’s list of microfluidics / lab-on-a-chip companies in a larger map. Note: locations of Japanese companies are approximate.

When I first wrote about FluidicMEMS.com’s global microfluidics map, I suspected that companies outside of the US/Europe were probably missing, due to the English-based search used to form the list. Indeed, I recently learned of several microfluidics-related businesses in Japan, thanks to Naofumi Tamai of the Japanese venture capital firm Nanotech Partners that funds Nano Fusion Technologies, which develops micro-electro-osmotic pumps.

Looking for more, I also found this 2006 report by Ryozo Tanaka of the British Embassy in Tokyo on “Microfluidic Chip Technologies in Japan.”  The report’s goal was to summarize the state of microfluidics in Japan, keeping in view potential UK-Japan collaborations.  It discusses Japanese microfluidics development in industry and academia, as well as public initiatives to promote microfluidics research. A couple paragraphs jumped out at me:

Japanese researchers do not have much awareness about the current status of microfluidics R&D in the UK. Most researchers know the name of Professor Andreas Manz, who proposed the concept of μTAS (Micro Total Analysis Systems) when he worked in Imperial College London, and some have an interest in microfluidics related products by Epigem Limited located in Redcar. Some were also aware that the UK had a national project related to microfluidics in the 1990s, and were interested in its output.

While having a lead over the UK in basic microfluidic chip technologies, Japan is searching for novel ideas for applications and more R&D is required to put microfluidic chips into wider commercialisation. Japanese companies and research institutions, especially manufacturing companies, welcome collaboration with UK stakeholders, particularly those who have chemical or pharmaceutical expertise.

I wonder how many people would agree with this statement, either in the context in which it was written (2006) or in today’s environment. Is there a need for more cross-national awareness of microfluidic development activity? Surely the big conferences such as MicroTAS fulfill part of this need in the academic realm, but what about in the commercial domain?

To start getting a picture of the Japanese microfluidics commercial landscape, here are a few example companies — for more see links below:

Nano Fusion Technologies
Nano Fusion Technologies specializes in customized microfluidics solutions, with a  focus on micro-electro-osmostic pumps for varied applications, including biomedical diagnostics, chemical analysis, and micro fuel cells.  In 2008, there were reports of a collaboration between Dolomite and Nano Fusion Technologies.

Fluidware Technologies
Fluidware Technologies‘ website is in Japanese, but we can glean some information from Ryozo Tanaka’s 2006 report: “Fluidware Technologies Inc. was established in 2002 to commercialise microfluidic chip related technologies developed at the Fujii Laboratory in the University of Tokyo. Its key technologies are microfluidic chips made of polydimethylsiloxane (PDMS) or polymethyl methacrylate (PMMA), and micro devices such as micro system pumps and optical detecting systems.”

Adbic
Adbic has been developing diagnostic microfluidic chips, including blood-based clinical diagnostics (e.g., blood urea nitrogen (BUN) for monitoring kidney function, and blood levels of potassium, sodium, glucose, and other molecules).  Adbic was spun out of Dr. Yasuhiro Horiike’s lab at the National Institute of Materials Science (NIMS) in 2004.

More microfluidics companies in Japan:

  • Institute of Microchemical Technology (IMT): Supplier of off-the-shelf and custom microfluidic chips for various applications. 
  • The Research Association of Micro Chemical Process Technology: Industry group designed to promote research on high-efficiency micro chemical process technology
  • Richell: Mass-produced, injection-molded microfluidic chips
  • Takasago Electric: Manufacturer of miniature chemically inert valves and pumps for applications such as medical diagnosis, environmental measurement, protein detection, and quality management (e.g., food safety)
  • YMC: Specializes in microreactors
  • Labcyte Japan: Japanese office of Labcyte, which specializes in assay miniaturization and automation, low-volume liquid handling for the life sciences
  • The Micro Chemical Initiative (MCI): A consortium of eight Japanese companies with interests in micro chemical applications of microfluidics (link from Tanaka’s 2006 report is entirely in Japanese, and does not appear to be active?)
  • Dolomite has an office in Japan

Are you aware of other commercial microfluidics activity in Japan? E-mail or comment!

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Microfluidic computation: Manu Prakash’s work on bubble logic

By Lily | Published: April 29, 2010

Microfluidic devices have been described as  “computer chips with plumbing.”  But could microfluidics actually be used for computation?  Manu Prakash thinks so.  As a student in Neil Gershenfeld’s lab at MIT, Prakash developed a system of microfluidic devices that use bubbles to perform Boolean logic functions (e.g., AND/OR/NOT) normally seen in electronic circuits.  Since graduating with a PhD in 2008, Prakash has been busy as a member of the Harvard Society of Fellows and will be starting a lab of his own next year to further explore what can be done with bubble logic.

We have invented a new logic family which implements universal Boolean logic, bistability and numerous other traits associated with a scalable logic family using immiscible fluids in microfluidic geometries. A bubble in a channel represents a bit. But unlike electronics, a bit of information can also carry a chemical payload, allowing us to manipulate materials and information at the same time. This paradigm ties together chemistry and computation.

Prakash is not the only one working on microbubbles/microdroplets, but his work is especially compelling because of the link between microfluidics and the huge intellectual toolkit that already exists around computation.  A PubMed search on “microfluidic droplet” turns up over 350 entries,  Raindance Technologies has been developing droplet technology for years, and droplets were the theme at the recent CfBI Microfluidics Consortium meeting in March — all indicators that microdroplets/bubble logic are a technology to keep watching.

For more on Prakash’s work:

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