In Greek mythology, Apollo was the god of medicine, healing and light. Microchip Biotechnologies, Inc. (MBI) is building a family of products, called Apollo, which will give ‘sample-to-answer solutions’ performance in many life science applications.
Our vision is to create sophisticated devices—using elegantly simple microfluidic valves, pumps and circuits in glass and plastic that will simplify the analysis of biological materials.
Our vision has initially lead to the creation of Apollo 100 System a simple-to-use, fully automated, high-performance platform that reduces reagent costs and improves analytic efficiencies while using only the tiniest amounts of sample. Future Apollo platforms will serve today’s laboratories while enabling emerging markets with compact, fully automated devices for life science applications in research, forensics and diagnostics.
MBI’s MOVeTM technology allowed an elegant solution to the challenge of effective mixing of nanoliter volumes. Additionally, the integration of paramagnetic bead technology with MBI’s MOVe chips solved the problem of matching large volume samples (mls) to the very small input levels (µls) required by modern instrumentation.
The Company has three founders: Dr. Stevan Jovanovich, Dr. Dennis Harris and Professor Rich Mathies. The founder’s vision was to focus on sample preparation for life science applications. Their joint perspective was that despite the dramatic breakthroughs in biological sample analysis enabled by new analytical instruments, the upfront handling and preparation of real world samples was lagging far behind. They saw many problems impeding the pace of basic life science research, and its practical applications. For example, the large mismatch between real world samples volumes and modern analytical systems is striking. Samples as large as 10 ml (10-2 liter) ultimately processed on advanced instruments, such as capillary sequencers and mass spectrographs at the nanoliter scale (10-9 liter). This mismatch causes expensive consumables and precious samples to be wasted. Scientists continue to face difficult choices; either retain manual and error-prone manual processing or invest in costly and massive laboratory automation and robotics. The sheer large footprint of fragmented workflows and applications restricts many applications to remote use in laboratories.
MBI was initially funded through ‘grants and contracts’ and still continues to use such funding mechanisms to explore methods in their research phase. Early contracts with the Department of Defense resulted in the creation and deployment of a monitoring system for pathogens and toxins called NanoBioSentinel™. NanoBioSentinel is an integrated, cartridge-based system that uses paramagnetic beads to capture, purify, and concentrate aerosol and other samples. After processing the samples, real-time nucleic acid amplification is performed, microchannel capillary electrophoresis confirms putative positives, and toxin samples are processed with fluorescent detection. The NanoBioSentinel was made possible by research breakthroughs using intellectual property licensed from University of California at Berkeley, and development of MBI’s core technologies, led to MBI’s first microchip for nanoliter volume reactions in 2004.
Since then, MBI has designed over 70 versions of the microchips for application specific automation, three generations of paramagnetic bead capture technologies, and two generations of the Apollo platforms for automated sample preparation.