Technology
The technology is based on the combination of deterministic lateral displacement (DLD) and dielectrophoretic forces (DEP), which are exerted by the three-dimensional electrodes in the device.
The fundamental technology was developed by a scientific collaboration between the Tegenfeldt lab at the University of Lund and the Laboratory of Life Sciences Electronics at EPFL.
The first version of the device, using the three-dimensional electrodes in combined DLD-DEP devices is can be found here:
Active Posts in Deterministic Lateral Displacement Devices
Microfluidic chip
Our microfluidic chip combines deterministic lateral displacement and dielectrophoresis capable of continuously purifying nanoparticles from liquid samples.
Plug and play device
A user-friendly plug an play device that contains the exchangable microfluidic chip and allows the user to adapt the voltage to the individual needs.
Training & service
We offer a complete training and service to support our customers in the usage of our device.
F.A.Q.
A major bottleneck for the discovery of new diagnostic markers from exosomes is still the reliable purification of exosomes from patient samples. The current available methods can only offer a trade-off between specificity and adaptivity and are therefore hindering research on a larger scale. We want to support exosome researchers with a platform purification protocol which can be rapidly adapted to their needs. They then have a reliable supply of exosomes for their experiments and can concentrate on their real goal: finding new diagnostic methods for patients.
Our key offering is a laboratory, bench scale device, capable of separating exosomes in biological samples (e.g. blood or urine). This device can be independently used by researchers after an initial training by us and adapts to different biological samples and purification challenges without many changes. The device incorporates a microfluidic chip, which is designed as a cartridge system which will be replaced with each new sample, ensuring sterility and reliable purification. Our customer benefits from an increased throughput and a greater choice of biological samples from which to extract.
The heart of the device is the microfluidic chip. By combining deterministic lateral displacement and dielectrophoresis on a microfluidic scale, this chip is able to continuously purify exosomes and other small vesicles from liquid samples. The exact novelty lies in the design and the arrangement of the electrodes in the flow channel and is currently in a patenting process at the EPFL. Furthermore, the manufacturing process requires a lot of skill and is already feasible on a wafer scale, allowing for a production at medium scale.
Our future customers are university laboratories as well as pharmaceutical R&D laboratories. Due to their high clinical potential, exosomes gained significant interest from both parties and each one of them is interested in their diagnostic as well as therapeutical capabilities. But in order to really advance their research, they need a lot of material to work with and must be able to quickly investigate a variety of biological samples which currently takes a lot of preparational work. Our device drastically decreases their effort to switch focus and will increase the experimental throughput.