Printing High-Density Proteins & Antibodies Onto Microarrays

Research from the University of Limerick, Ireland has led to the development of an innovative fluid handling technology that operates in the pico and nano liter volume range, and a spinoff company called Poly-Pico Technologies. The company offers off-the-shelf and custom solutions to meet ultra-low volume dispensing needs. Applications of the new technology include printing of high-density protein, antibody, or DNA microarrays; digital polymerase chain reaction (PCR); high-throughput screening and drug discovery; and dispensing of living cells.

Transcript

00:00:01 [Music] welcome to the University of limr my name is Paul Dylan and I'm the director of the technology transfer office we have a proud tradition of bringing our research results to the marketplace the clip you're about to see is another example of an exciting UL Innovation that has arisen out of our research activities

00:00:32 [Music] I'm spinning out a company here from the University of limmer the company's called poly Pico Technologies limited we've developed a technology to print [Music] biomaterials so we can print things like proteins and antibodies onto microarrays we can also uh do DNA amplification with this particular

00:00:54 technology we're able to dispense very minute volumes of fluid in the region of 100 picol lers one of the key facets of the technology is that we're able to avoid completely cross-contamination between samples because just as you use disposable tips with Petes we use disposable cartridges in this particular technology so you can uh store the fluid in the uh cartridge use as much as you

00:01:20 want and then put it in the freezer down to minus 80 and if you want to to reuse more of that fluid you simply to it out and reinsert it into the machine we started working on this technology over 5 years ago in another company and um we developed a inkjet printer heads and we noticed that this technology was really interesting it would probably have applications in the

00:01:42 biomedical space so we assigned in the technology to University of Limer and we were successful in getting um approximately 230,000 of funding competitively from the Irish government and over the past two years we've uh developed the technology to a state where it's very mature and ready to Market a lot of people would be interested in

00:02:02 this technology including those who are currently working in the area of micro raise proteins and antibody microw for drug Discovery or Diagnostics potentially all the universities and the hospitals and uh those companies who are working in this space too currently we've uh completed our 5 years of research and we've also filed for patents uh they're currently at PCT

00:02:26 stage uh we've had independent patent search reports completed and things looking very positive we've manufactured a number of the units and we've gotten over all the manufacturing issues this technology has the opportunity to be used in every research laboratory or company who are currently working in the area of microway there's a huge potential for any investor or

00:02:49 partner company to work with us in exploring this massive [Music] opportunity [Music]