Category: 2. Microfluidics Business News

In a recent Forbes profile, author Peter Cohan suggests that 908 Devices, based in Boston, may be a good company to consider for investment. He notes that they are doing several things right that are keeping them nimble, including attracting top talent, empowering employees closest to clients, launching products quickly and fighting bureaucracy.

The company uses microfluidic chips for electrophoresis-based sample preparation and electrospray ionisation (ESI) for sample introduction into their revolutionary desktop or hand-held, low power, high (atmospheric) pressure mass spectrometers (HPMS) that perform the sample analysis. In some cases the HPMS operates alone. More information is available on their website, including a listing of their suite of patents relating to both the microfluidic ESI and HPMS aspects of their core technology. Applications vary from cell biology analysis, detection of drugs (e.g. fentanyls, opioids and amphetamines), explosives and chemical warfare agents. Importantly, the chips are easy to use, and instrumentation is coupled to powerful electronics and software to automate all operations and analysis computations, and thus afford a simplified, practical interface suitable for a broad base of operators.

The company was founded 9 years ago, and had its IPO in December, 2020. It’s stock has dipped slightly, but revenue grew by 50% last year to USD $26.9 M and is projected to grow another 45% in 2021. The company also just landed a USD $25M purchase contract from the US Army for 350 of its MX908® portable MS instruments for on-site explosive threat detection and evaluation applications.

Cohan notes that 908 Devices avoids agility potholes such as forcing valuable employees who intimately understand the technology, customers and competition to do “tooth-cleaning-like reviews” for C-suite executives. CEO Kevin Knopp noted in his interview with Cohan that they intentionally maintain a fairly flat organisational structure, hire high-calibre talent, and empower their employees to listen to customers and react accordingly.

Cohan summarises: “If 908 can figure out an easy button for sustaining 50% annual revenue growth, its stock is a buy.”

New research from Edmond Walsh’s group at the University of Oxford and Iota Sciences demonstrates rapid in situ device prototyping in a plastic Petri dish using robotic jet printing.  The work was published in Advanced Science 2 weeks ago.

Beginning with a Petri dish containing an aqueous cell medium, the procedure entails covering the medium with a second immiscible layer of FC40 fluorocarbon, and then jetting the fluorocarbon through the medium to make contact with and stick to the Petri dish via preferential wetting.  The moving jet nozzle can thus define channel & chamber walls bonded to the Petri dish surface and directly write a fluidic channel network according to a CAD layout input.  The jet stays in the fluorocarbon, making the fabrication contactless.  Writing time depends on the design complexity, but may be about five minutes.  A diagram of the fabrication procedure is shown at right above, and a fluidic maze structure created with this technique is show at right below.  First author Cristian Soitu’s Twitter feed (@CristianSoitu) has an impressive video showing the creation of some devices.

The authors have done a nice job of characterising the various parameters relevant to creating walls or features from the fluorocarbon, such as jet nozzle height, diameter, flow rate, lateral speed, wall thickness and channel widths.  The ability to pipet into enclosed chamber arrays was also explored in terms of volume ranges and resistance to cross-contamination.  Preliminary cloning studies with different cells suggested comparable cloning efficiency vs. normal Petri dishes without fluorocarbon structures.

The possibilities afforded by such a direct-write technique are compelling.  An ability to create custom microfluidic structures for a given pattern of cells or conceivably other analytes adsorbed on a solid substrate with secluded, sterile and controllable environments seems like a window into new analytical techniques enabled by powerful sampling and work-up strategies.  Iota Sciences appears to be moving the technology forward for cell cloning purposes.

A recent article by Bradley Fikes in the San Diego Union-Tribune highlighted the progress achieved by a local leading biotech company, BioFluidica.  Founded by Professor Steve Soper at Kansas University and headed up by CEO Dr. Rolf Muller, two veterans in the area of microfluidics research and product development, the company is effectively translating the inherent capabilities of lab-on-a-chip technology into the foundation of their cancer-screening products.

BioFluidica uses injection moulding to economically mass produce their plastic microfluidics chips.  While injection moulding has been effectively applied to microfluidic products with ‘normal’ channel geometries (width similar to depth), BioFluidica’s device channels appear to be tall and thin, making high fidelity, high volume reproduction challenging.  That they can use injection moulding for these devices is no mean feat; it is not a surprise to hear that they had to go through several manufacturers before finding one in Austria equal to the task

The devices are used to perform affinity-based assays of circulating tumour cells (CTCs), and work directly with whole blood, a distinct advantage in terms of cost and ease-of use, and also likely in terms of the quality of the assay results.  BioFluidica estimates that lung biopsy screens would be reduced from $10,000 USD to roughly $5,000 using their technology.

Fascinating research from the Qinghuang Lin lab at IBM Research in NY, published in Nature Communications and highlighted in Cytofluidix, shows an elaborate but potentially mass-producible microfluidic and nanofluidic lab-on-a-chip device that draws DNA molecules through arrays of nanometre-sized pillars.  The DNA reptation in these structure stretches the molecules out, as in gel-based electrophoretic separations of DNA, and may enable identification of biomarkers that indicate diseases.  The Cytofluidix summary page shows an engaging video of DNA migration through the pillar array.

The research team had to overcome sizable challenges associated with the nanofabrication of the different structures that act as the DNA sieving medium.  Researchers used a sacrificial silicon layer for the nanofluidic channels, and were able to overcome diffusion-limitted etching constraints by using temporary venting holes to accelerate the etching by 2 orders of magnitude.  This process improvement may be the key to making the device a manufacturable product instead of a clever academic exercise.

A recent article by Azo Materials featured a microfluidic nanoparticle analyser product from Spectrodyne.  The “nCS1” system appears to reap the benefits of precise small volume fluid manipulations in disposable microfluidic cartridges to eliminate sample cross-talk and any need for cleaning.

The system is an advanced Coulter counter, and has sufficiently high resolution to allow it to achieve superior measurements of particle polydispersity in a given sample.  Particle sizing is from 40-2000 nm for 10^5 to 10^12 particles/mL, with precision of better than +/- 3% on sizing and +/-10% on concentration.

Large collaboration led by Ali Khademhosseini at Harvard University shows slick Google Glass-controlled microfluidics pH & temperature biosensor linked to reagent delivery hardware in Nature article. Perhaps of interest to Google Glass developers & fans (Robert Stepisnik, Saurabh Bhardwaj, Charles Coltman, Polina Zabarko).