The Company has three founders: Dr. Stevan Jovanovich, Dr. Dennis Harris and Professor Rich Mathies. Over many conversations, 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.

The founder’s vision was to focus on sample preparation for life science applications on microchips using a unique microfluidic valve developed in Professor Mathies Laboratory (Grover, W. H., Skelley, A. M., Liu, C. N., Lagally, E. T., and Mathies, R. A. Monolithic Membrane Valves and Diaphragm Pumps for Practical Large-Scale Integration into Microfluidic Devices, Sensors & Actuators B, 89, 315-323 [2003]). Microchip Biotechnologies was founded to take this core technology and ultimately integrate sample preparation with analytical instrumentation.

Sample preparation is an area that is still poorly served in the life sciences revolution and users are still facing these challenges today. MBI commenced building its platform through a ‘grants and contracts’ program.

MBI was initially funded through ‘grants and contracts’ and still continues this business. An early breakthrough came in a contract with the Department of Defense to create a monitoring system for pathogens and toxins. The goal was to determine the presence of multiple biothreat agents with high sensitivity and low false alarm rates. The solution was NanoBioSentinel^TM, 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, enabling intellectual property licensed from University of California at Berkeley, and development of MBI’s core technologies which led to MBI’s first microchip for nanoliter volume reactions in 2004. Since then, MBI has designed over 30 versions of the microchips, three generations of BeadStorm^TM, and two generations of the Apollo platforms for automated sample preparation on microchips integrated with robotics.

A breakthrough accomplishment was utilizing MOV^TM technology to solve the challenge of effective mixing of nanoliter volumes. Additionally, the problem of processing large samples to the very small input levels required by modern instrumentation and MBI’s MOV chips was solved with BeadStorm. BeadStorm was initially developed to capture possible airborne toxins for detection. BeadStorm uses bead-based sample pre-processing to capture, concentrate, and purify samples from large volumes into microliter or smaller volumes.

To begin commercialization of its platform, MBI completed a $4.5M Series A equity round with In-Q-Tel and RONA Associates with an associated forensics project sponsored by In-Q-Tel. Series A financing closed in July 2006. Using both Series A funding and technology from its grants and contracts programs, MBI has developed the Apollo platform along with the company infrastructure needed to commercialize products. The Company now has advanced prototypes of its first product, the Apollo 100 and plans to ship its first product in 2008.