Akonni Bioystems was awarded a $498,780 Phase II SBIR Grant from the national Science Foundation to further develop its Lab-on-a-Film, which has been designed as an ultra-low-cost microarray film manufactured using an automated reel-to-reel production process.
The firm claims the Lab-on-a-Film technology has the potential to allow the production of multiplexed microarray consumables for just a few dollars. The platform hinges on Akonni’s TruArray™ gel-drop multiplex microarray technology, and is being designed to allow the production of a hands-free, end-to-end genetic testing system.
Akonni’s TruArray technology involves attaching capture probes covalently to an ultra-high surface area polymer backbone of discrete three dimensional gel-drops rather than a two-dimensional substrate. The firm says this means the individual gel drops behave as individual nanoliter, solution-phase test tubes, which negates the potential for unpredictable and/or uncharacterized artifacts arising from probe deposition directly on a two-dimensional surface.