Curiox Biosystems has developed a miniaturisation platform that enables cheaper and more efficient bioassays to be conducted, potentially slashing the costs of life science and drug discovery research.

The pharmaceutical industry is under increasing pressure to deliver drugs to the market faster and more efficiently as development time and cost spirals and the price of failure escalates.

In an effort to combat this, Curiox Biosystems has developed the DropArray, a miniaturisation platform that the company claims can reduce the amount of material and reagent required to conduct a cell-based assay by a factor of a 1000 and reduce the reaction time by a factor of ten.

It achieves this by integrating unique surface chemistries with a microfluidics system that enables test volumes to be reduced from 50-100µl down to 100nl.

Each DropArray chip is comprised of a small flat rectangular patterned glass slide, no bigger than 3cm by 9cm, that contains thousands of hydrophilic glass wells that are surrounded by a hydrophobic coating.

The wells act as small test tubes in to which the test material and reagents are added, mixed and incubated using an automated bench-top station. The technology was developed by Singapore's Institute of Bioengineering and Nanotechnology (IBN), with Curiox having been spun out of the Institute to commercialise the technology.

"Our technology has the potential to accelerate life science, drug discovery and clinical research," said Dr Namyong Kim, IBN Team Leader.

"Using our technology, companies can benefit from huge savings in time and money spent on research and development and this would have a direct impact on the cost of medication and new drugs for the consumer."

The company claims that the time taken to perform some tests can be slashed by up to 60 percent, with consumable costs being reduced by nearly 90 per cent. The company has highlighted that the DropArray enables researchers to conduct cell-based tests including cancer stem cell immunoassays that are extremely challenging with conventional technology.

In addition, it notes that the reduction in sample volumes provides advantages for protein-based assays such as ELISA (enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay) enabling tests to be run on small samples of human (or animal) serum.

กก