SBIR Phase II: High-Throughput Differential Scanning Calorimeter for Drug Discovery and Research

The broader impact/commercial potential of this Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase II project is the production and manufacture of the first user-friendly, high-throughput, and low-cost Differential Scanning Calorimeter (DSC) instrument. This DSC instrument is an advancement for label free analytical instruments with broad commercial and industrial potential. DSC analysis can provide extremely powerful tools for drug discovery that have low adoption due to high costs and low throughput of only one sample every two hours. The power of DSC is the thermodynamic measurements which do not require any prior specific knowledge of the molecules being studied and does not require any labels. Innovations from this project will also reduce the cost of producing DSC instruments, making them widely available for research and educational purposes. Reducing the complexity of experiments and costs of instruments will lead to lower drug development costs. An additional benefit of these advancements is the potential to also serve as an effective tool for teaching thermodynamics. The combination of unique knowledge provided by DSC analysis with a low-cost instrument will serve to reduce the costs associated with discovering and analyzing potential new drug molecules and provide an effective tool for teaching thermodynamics. The Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase II project comprises the research and development activities that are necessary to translate the successful Phase I prototype into a commercially viable product. A key innovative component of the product is the low-cost, sterile, and disposable sample cartridges. There are three primary activities comprising this Phase II project. The first is to iterate and finalize the innovative design features of the instrument including mechanical assembly, sample cartridges, and pressurization. The second is to rigorously test the instrument using well defined and commonly studied proteins to obtain demonstrable applications for which to establish a baseline for comparisons with competing instruments. Third is the optimization and integration of individual instrument components and software to demonstrate their collective operational functionality. These accomplishments will enable the development of preproduction instruments that will be manufactured and placed with trusted third parties for independent testing and verification of operation. Completion of the targeted activities will enable manufacturing of both the novel DSC instrument and supporting consumable sample cartridges for mass production and wide distribution to customers. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.