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GLASS 'LABS ON A CHIP' [Albuquerque Journal, N.M.](Albuquerque Journal (NM) Via Acquire Media NewsEdge) Nov. 29--It's what you can't see that makes Life BioScience products so potentially big. Formed four years ago, the 12-employee Albuquerque firm invented a unique glass ceramic material whose properties enable three-dimensional microstructures to be patterned into it, making it well-suited for any number of applications in the medical, telecommunications, aerospace, even automotive industries. "That's kind of the challenge and the curse," CEO Blake Ridgeway said. "There are literally hundreds of things we can do with our specialized glass. The question is, how much do you want to bite off and get out the door?" For starters, it's hoping to make a big impact on the $4 billion-a-year market for "life science" tools. Among its first products are a series of microarrays, or "labs on a chip," that would allow researchers to perform thousands of different experiments on a single microscope slide -- a highly cost-effective solution for those in the diagnostic, drug discovery and other research fields. "Every government research lab, national institute of health, every science foundation, every university involved in trying to figure out biochemical interactions is a potential customer for our product," Ridgeway said. The company has also found that its glass ceramic material has broad appeal in the microfabrication and electronics packaging arena. Not stopping there, it is actively researching what other types of applications might be available down the road. Laboratory on a slide The material is composed of 12 or so substances that are mixed and melted to create an ingot, typically in 6- and 8-inch widths, with some special properties. The ingot is cut and polished, and then sliced into wafers, similar to the process used to make a semiconductor. The raw wafer is masked with the desired design and exposed to UV light. The exposure changes the unmasked portion of the wafer into a ceramic. It is then baked, making it ready to be etched in acid. "The etching will actually eat away preferentially on the areas we've turned into a ceramic," Ridgeway said. The process allows for complex, minute threedimensionsal patterns to be created. "We can pattern it down to about 5 microns in dimension, which is about a 20th of the width of human hair," he said. Ridgeway showed one of the demonstration microscope slides embedded with a Life BioScience microarray. On the array are 16 rows of "microwells" barely visible to the naked eye, with 225 wells in each row -- or 3,600 total. "If you remember back in the old chemistry days maybe holding onto a test tube, we've been able to shrink that test tube and multiply it across a microscope slide," he said. Life BioScience microarrays are available with different well depths and densities, catering not only to mom-and-pop labs but also advanced research companies with printers that can deposit hundreds, or even thousands, of biological materials on a slide. "The closest I can find is there is a company out there that can do a little over 1,500 wells, Ridgeway said. "(We) can do well over 150,000 wells on the same form factor." Affordable and scalable At roughly $50 a slide, it boils down to "value" proposition, Ridgeway said. For example, pharmaceutical companies commonly use a "brute force" approach to explore new drugs. For a new cancer treatment, a company might analyze the impacts of a million compounds against a receptor in a cell, he said. "We're going to give them geometries where they could run the equivalent of 2,700 experiments on a single slide," he said. "By reducing the size of the analysis platform, we allow the researcher to reduce the amount of chemicals used in the testing, which is very, very costly. That's cost savings for them." Among its microarray products is one invented by Life BioScience, called a micropillar, that offers better interaction in fluid environments in detection research than what the wells afford, according to Ridgeway. On microscope slides, they appear as tiny posts standing up to a halfmillimeter high. "We're doing something with the UNM pharmacy school for prostate cancer detection and they're actually growing prostate cells on top of the pillars," he said. "It removes all the background noise and other types of cells. It's just the cells of interest." Consistency in the manner the slides are made gives Life BioScience an edge over the competition, which includes Corning Life Sciences and the Schott Glass Co., Ridgeway said. "Since we're relying on a really straightforward process, we can make our slides the same way from lot to lot, batch to batch," he said. "The last thing you want to do is spend millions of dollars finding that important chemical reagent and have the test blow up on you because your substrate was bad." The life science tool market isn't the only one on the company's radar. It's also begun developing products in the microfabrication and electronics packaging arena. Ridgeway said one customer has turned to Life Bioscience to come up with a package for chips and integrated circuits to install on a PC motherboard. Cooling capability "The nice thing about it is because we pattern this material, we can include things like channels for cooling so you can actually cool the chip while communicating with the motherboard to eliminate heat from the unit and prolong the life of the semiconductor," Ridgeway said. "We're getting quite a bit of pull in those kinds of things." A customer that digs geothermal wells recently approached the company for some help with hightemperature electronics using the material created by Life Bioscience. "They want to be able to communicate and have some smarts down at the drill bit at the head that goes into the earth under very, very hot temperatures and pressures," Ridgeway said. "The ceramic is very resistant to heat, so you've got a package that will protect your electronic circuitry from heat impacts." The company is also pursuing what it calls advanced concepts -- "kind of the far-out stuff, if you will," Ridgeway said. The company is working on a sensor to detect viruses in cattle in a fraction of the time it takes with conventional methods. Consisting of micropillars that can penetrate epidermal layers but not deep enough to register pain, the sensor would be affixed to the animal's ear. "In each one of the tips (of the micropillars), we create a biological lock and key," Ridgeway said. "If the animal has got the virus, it opens the lock and gives us an electronic signal." There are myriad human applications. Although he's uncertain the company would try to tap the already crowded market for painless detection for diabetes, Ridgeway said the sensor could be adapted for early detection of heart attacks by identifying the presence of troponin in the blood system. "That test takes eight hours to run in the hospital, but we've seen in some of the lab workups where troponin is being detected on a much faster basis," he said. Ridgeway, who was involved in several IT startups before starting Life BioScience, expects the company staff to expand "as soon as we get some of these projects launched." "We're hoping we're going to be the Microsoft that stays in Albuquerque," he said, a reference to that company's New Mexico birthplace more than 30 years ago. To see more of the Albuquerque Journal, or to subscribe to the newspaper, go to http://www.abqjournal.com. Copyright (c) 2010, Albuquerque Journal, N.M. Distributed by McClatchy-Tribune Information Services. For more information about the content services offered by McClatchy-Tribune Information Services (MCT), visit www.mctinfoservices.com, e-mail [email protected], or call 866-280-5210 (outside the United States, call +1 312-222-4544) |