SBIR Phase II: A Higher Throughput SPR Biosensor

This award is funded under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (Public Law 111-5). This Small Business Innovation Research Phase II project will develop a 48 channel surface plasmon resonance (SPR) instrument and demonstrate a high throughput flow cell array for use with a variety of label-free biosensing platforms. Flow cell technology is currently the limiting factor in the development of high throughput label-free sensing technologies. Modification of Wasatch Microfluidics Continuous Flow MicrospotterTM into a highly parallel flow cell should begin to eliminate this bottleneck and provide a template for even more highly parallel systems. We will develop an understanding of how the proposed flow cell technology will impact the sensing capabilities of a commercial-ready surface plasmon resonance (SPR) instrument and an optimized baseline protocols will be developed. The end result will be a 48 channel flow cell, which will be scalable to much higher throughputs (192, 1536). This flow cell will be flexible such that it will be easily integrated with a variety of label-free sensing technologies. The end result of this research and development effort will be an SPR instrument with approximately 10 times the capacity of the best current systems and will lay the ground work for much higher density systems. The broader impacts of this technology include the commercial opportunities of the Microfluidic Flow Cell Array (MFCA). The MFCA will be developed for integration with the biosensing platforms of a number of other companies. Specifically we will target label-free technologies used to measure kinetic and affinity constants for binding of molecules to one another. This is currently a $100M/year market. From our discussions with pharmaceutical companies, higher throughput label-free systems will lead to much larger implementation of these technologies and a significant commercial potential, including a larger market opportunity. Even the most basic implementation of our flow cell will have a substantial impact. Currently, it takes the flagship Biacore (GE) instrument up to 28 hrs to process 384 samples. These same 384 samples would only take 1 hr with our proposed combined MFCA / SPR instrument utilizing our CFM technology. These same instruments will then lead to substantially faster and more effective drug discovery processes, and eventually better health for the US population.