Measuring the Concentration of Host-cell Proteins in Biomanufacturing Using Silicon Nanowire Array Sensors

Our innovation is a low cost, sensitive, quantitative biosensor that can detect many biomarkers on the same chip. Our sensor consists of vertically aligned silicon nanowires. The silicon nanowires’ high surface area to volume ratio makes them sensitive to the environment around them and can thus lead to high sensitivity detection. Each of the nanowires can be functionalized to be sensitive to either specific DNA or proteins. For Phase 1 of this SBIR, we will apply our already demonstrated biosensor to monitoring HCPs in biomanufacturing. In particular, we will functionalize our silicon nanowires to be sensitive to Escherichia coli (E. coli) HCPs. As a first step we will measure a conglomerate of HCPs that are present in potential product, but eventually we will separate the antibodies and measure each protein in a separate sub-sensor.