by Paul Pyzowski, Guest Contributor
MIT's Deshpande Center was established in 2002 to "accelerate the migration of ideas from the lab to practical commercial application". The Deshpande Center provides MIT faculty and students with small cash grants along with systematic mentoring, resulting in the creation of twenty new start-ups to date. Many of these projects and start-ups are highlighted at the Deshpande’s annual Ideastream Conference. Unsurprisingly, these can involve MEMS and microfabrication -- at this year’s conference, held in Boston on April 13, the plenary session alone had three separate presentations involving MEMS and microfabrication.
First up was Hepregen, a drug discovery tools company and Deshpande success story that has raised $5 million in venture capital and nearly $2 million in grant financing. Hepregen came out of a 2006 Deshpande project to combine microfabrication and tissue engineering to create working laboratory models of a functioning liver, compatible with the drug-industry’s standard 96-well plate instrumentation format. Hepregen is addressing a well-known "pain point" in the pharmaceutical industry, the lack of good outside-of-the-body models for liver function. Hepregen’s hepatocytes can mimic liver function for weeks or longer, as opposed to mere hours for other models, so that these models can be used to evaluate drug candidates for long-term drug toxicity even before starting animal and human trials. This is no small matter -- drug toxicity and especially liver toxicity is the leading reason new drug candidates fail in phase III clinical trials, and was the reason that Rezulin, a diabetes drug with $1.8 billion in annual sales was pulled from the market.
Next up was "MEMS for Large Area and Flexible Applications". Professor Vladimir Bulovic’s lab had previously spun out two other start-ups -- QD Vision and Kateeva -- with technology related to "large scale" electronics manufacturing. With this project, Professor Bulovic applied this expertise to fabricate large arrays of MEMS capacitive pressure sensors using micro-contact printing on flexible substrates. The manufacturing process works at room temperature and is solvent free, and Bulovic estimated the manufacturing cost could be brought down to less than US$1 per square inch as compared to $500 or more for silicon-based MEMS. What was less clear was the commercial driver for this: pressure-sensing "skins" were mentioned, and the students supporting the program had talked with automotive companies about applications, but no one seemed to be convinced that there was a "killer app" yet.
Several other presentations involved novel microfluidic structures and applications in life sciences. Professor Christopher Love presented "Quantitative Diagnostic for Allergies Using Single Cell Technology" that uses a novel array of sub-nanoliter wells in PDMS along with small scale fluid flow to manipulate and analyze individual cells, with a focus on developing better predictive allergy tests. Professor Rohit Karnik presented a microfluidic "Novel Device for Label-Free Cell Rolling Separation" that has applications with stem cells. Both professors were looking to form start-ups around their respective projects.
Copyright 2010 MEMS Investor Journal
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