This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase II project will further develop and commercialize a groundbreaking technology for high-throughput cost-effective screening and analysis. This technology addresses the growing disparity between the ability to generate high-complexity chemical libraries with molecular genetics and combinatorial chemistry approaches, versus the ability to rapidly screen these libraries for high-value molecules. This new high-throughput screening product is a novel integration of an acoustic ejection device with chip-based mass spectrometry to produce mass readout microarrays that are analyzed in high-throughput with mass spectrometry imaging and computational algorithms. Phase II efforts will focus on a high-throughput screening product for cellulase enzyme discovery, a critical enzyme in the production of alternative fuels that is limited by optically based screens which often generate false leads. Importantly, this integrated high-throughput platform does not require sample labeling, is applicable to a broad range of chemical activities, and provides much more information from a single readout than current approaches. Phase II development will produce a commercial screening technology with these advantages and analysis throughput of 250,000 samples/week, while maintaining the flexibility for future applications in the industrial, pharmaceutical and diagnostic markets.
The broader impact/commercial potential of this project are cost-effective high-throughput discovery of new enzymes and molecules with enhanced or novel activities in the industrial, environmental, pharmaceutical or diagnostic markets. Also, the proposed technology enables entirely new types of high-throughput screens that are currently inaccessible with existing technologies. Most immediately this high-throughput screening product will be commercialized for application in the $1 billion industrial enzyme market with specific focus on one of the largest fractions of this market, the enzymes important for efficient and economically viable production of second-generation alternative fuels. Beyond the application to alternative fuels, Phase II development will produce a flexible discovery platform that can be expanded to numerous commercial markets. For example, the Phase II developments can also help develop new lower-cost therapeutics by reducing false leads and enable higher specificity diagnostics and testing by providing much more chemical information.
This SBIR project enabled the development of a new mass spectrometry based high-throughput, low-cost chemical analysis technology using very low sample volumes (nanoliters) and sub-second per-sample analysis time. As a result of this successful SBIR project new hardware, chemistry and software combine mass spectrometry, chip-based sample array deposition and high-speed mass spectrum processing algorithms into a platform that enables screening and analysis of large chemical libraries previously inhibited by excessive time, cost, sample consumption and false leads due to chemical labeling modifications. As a result of this SBIR Project, the resulting platform is being used commercially in the following three applications: 1) Industrial Enzyme Discovery 2) Pharmaceutical Drug Discovery 3) Product Quality Control Particularly in these three markets where the mass spectrometry platform resulting from this SBIR project is being applied, this new technology is transforming: - The ability to discover new industrial enzymes for energy, food and environmental applications by overcoming a key false-lead hurdle in enzyme screening and providing much more chemically-specific information about enzyme library activity. - The way drugs are being developed by providing much more information about drug libraries and their solubility, activity, metabolism and toxicity. - The (lower) cost of quality control and allowing for quality analysis of many more samples than previously possible.
