This Small Business Innovation Research Phase I project will develop a new technology to make uniform polystyrene coated iron particles for bio-magnetic separations. Bio-magnetic separations are an emerging technology using magnetism, sometimes with conventional separations or identification methods, to purify cells, proteins and nucleic acids. They are increasingly appealing due to their scalability, efficiency, simplicity, mild conditions, ease of automation, and low cost. However, current methods that make polymers first followed by attempts to engulf ultra-fine magnetite (e.g. y-Fe304) or ferrite (e.g. y-Fe203) into the polymeric colloidal particles are not efficient, or effective. As a result, the final product has low magnetite or ferrite content hence low efficiency in bio-magnetic separation. At the same time, there are few suppliers, some products have poor quality, and there is little selectivity in terms of size of the beads and surface chemistry of the beads. In this Phase I effort, MMI proposes to synthesize nanoscale Fe styrene colloidal solutions by the solvated metal atoms dispersion (SMAD) method, followed by polymerizing styrene. The polystyrene-coated iron particles are expected to be superparamagnetic and have superior properties in bio-magnetic separations after proper surface modification. There are many applications for the polystyrene coated iron particles, such as cell separation, immunoassays, latex agglutination, cell tags, blood flow markers, chromatographic assays, blood cell stimulation, magnetic resonance imaging contrast agents, micro-carriers in cell culture, DNA probes/PCR.
