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“This is a great concept. “I think it’s too late for chip manufacturers to do something for us in the biosciences,” says Nils Walter, a chemist at the University of Michigan and co-founder of aLight Sciences, a company that develops single molecules as biosensors. use emission.
Roswell isn’t the only company pursuing chip-based biosensors. For example, Munich-based Dynamic Biosensors offers chips with DNA-based sensors that use light. But Merriman says Roswell’s fabrication approach produces sensitive sensors that are flexible enough to envision a “universal biosensor” that can be mass-produced with modern chipmaking techniques.
The centerpiece of Roswell’s circuits is a molecular wire made from a chain of amino acids that connects to the rest of the chip just like a regular metallic wire. To create a sensor, the lab attaches a molecule to the other end of the wire. When this molecule interacts with its intended target – be it a DNA sequence, an antibody, or any other biologically relevant molecule – its electrical conductivity changes. The chip records this change and the software extracts the relevant interaction details.
ROSWELL BIOTECHNOLOGIES
To assemble thousands of sensors, Roswell starts with a silicon chip decorated with pre-made nanoelectrodes, then uses electrical voltage to pull molecules out of solution and onto the chip. This part of the assembly process takes less than 10 seconds; In the past, similar molecular processes took hours or even days.
Roswell’s approach revive some hope molecular electronics researchers were 20 years ago. At the time, it seemed that small-sized molecules could help make circuit components smaller and computational chips denser. George Church, a Harvard geneticist and a member of Roswell’s scientific advisory board, surprisingly notes that a molecular chip manufacturer, in principle, “self-assembles circuits” by adding molecules under highly controlled conditions and allowing them to self-assemble into desired structures. can bring it together,” he explains. .
Excitement about such molecular properties led to the rapid growth of the field of molecular electronics in the late 1990s. It seemed like the perfect moment. “Throughout the ’80s and ’90s, there was all this guesswork about how silicon would hit a brick wall,” Tour recalls. But it didn’t; The engineers continued to advance. “We were not shooting at a static target. Silicon continued to outperform,” he says. Physicist Philip Collins of the University of California, Irvine, who has previously consulted with Roswell, says the subsequent decline in molecular electronics has been quite dramatic: “I think nine out of 10 researchers have dropped out.”
With the new chip, Roswell is targeting an application where silicon is not suitable. Molecules are special because “they can be much more complex than binary,” Collins says. “They can encode all these interesting different situations that we don’t have other avenues of access to, like in biochemistry.”
The new vision shared by Roswell and other on-chip molecular technology manufacturers is about biosensors that will allow people to check for biomarkers such as vitamin levels or evidence of an infection. rate a smartwatch. In Roswell’s case, thousands of biosensors can simultaneously sense different molecular interactions and chips can be discarded.
Walter of the University of Michigan notes that although Roswell’s device can house more than 10,000 biosensors on a chip, with hundreds of thousands or millions of them, more will push the device towards more marketable functionality, especially when it comes to early detection of biomarkers at low concentrations. . illness.
ROSWELL BIOTECHNOLOGIES
The commercial biotech market is not a new arena for Church, Merriman and other corporate leaders. But the Roswell team’s experience and expertise hasn’t made the company’s financing journey as easy as CEO Paul Mola had once hoped. After the company’s report in January, Mola said he expected venture capital to flow, but that didn’t happen. Roswell had to nearly halve its workforce in February, despite raising more than $60 million so far, primarily from strategic investors and representatives of wealthy families.
Mola says he was frustrated by the lack of investment in the company while it was so close to commercialization. “We actually feel like we’re doing a lot with very little,” she says. “Now we really need society to step up, support us and take us all the way.”
Mola, who is black, says part of the problem lies in the biotech industry’s troubled history with diversity.A concern reported by Stat in early March. “If you think about entrepreneurs and founders, they often had an entrepreneur in their family, they have networks and investor access. “From a systemic and fundamental perspective, Black founders don’t have that,” he says. “I don’t have this.”
Mola says Roswell is on track to launch a commercial device by the end of the year. The startup is about to begin its next round of funding. It also offers a service that can attract customers before it’s possible to sell chips directly: scientists will now be able to send samples to Roswell and have their molecular biosensors run on them at home, collecting valuable data about the sample. , real-time function of new drugs.
For Tour, Roswell’s work remains a symbol of the rebirth of molecular electronics: “It’s nice to see something happen and say, “Okay, it worked, it took longer than we thought.”
Karmela Padavic-Callaghan is a freelance journalist based in Brooklyn, New York.
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