Science is moving from an age in which researchers can sequence genomes, to one in which doctors can use them in developing individual treatments. But one hurdle along the way will be developing the ability to analyze individual DNA molecules, which is currently very difficult.

Tiny Philadelphia start-up BioNanomatrix, a spinoff of Princeton University, aims to change that. Flush with two sizeable new grants received in September, it's developing a technology that would sort chromosomes and guide their DNA into a maze of nanoscale channels. There, the molecules could be imaged and analyzed individually.

"Today it's a bit of an esoteric art to spread chromosomes out on a slide" for analysis, says company CEO and president Michael Boyce-Jacino. "The idea that you could put it into a device that would do the sorting for you, a 'lab on a chip'--that would really allow you to standardize the samples" and allow higher-resolution analysis.

BioNanomatrix is one of more than 50 small businesses with which Princeton has partnered through its materials research arm, the Princeton Institute for the Science and Technology of Materials (PRISM), says Joseph Montemarano, the institute's director for industrial liaison.

With its sophisticated equipment and micro- and nano-fabrication lab, the institute has acted as an engine for small technology business development in the region since its founding in 2003, Montemarano says. Among the institute's partners in the life-science area, he adds, BioNanomatrix is the "furthest along" in product development.

Its chief scientific officer, Han Cao, founded the company that same year based on technology he had co-developed while a postdoctoral researcher with Princeton Professor of Engineering Stephen Y. Chou. In the June 24, 2002 issue of Applied Physics Letters, Chou, Cao and colleagues reported building the world's smallest enclosed channel, less than 10 nanometers wide. A few months later in the journal's Oct. 14 issue, they described a technique in which DNA could be guided into a series of nanochannels etched in a chip using standard, inexpensive lithographic techniques.

These 100-nanometer wide tunnels can have a transparent "roof" that allows molecules to be imaged while inside them, says Boyce-Jacino, who joined the company in 2004 after serving as chief scientific officer for the Princeton forensic DNA-testing company Orchid Biosciences.

Although the company has only four employees, it has extended its reach by contracting out some of its work, Boyce-Jacino says, and by obtaining grants. On Sept. 24, the company announced that it had won a two-year, $200,000 grant from the National Cancer Institute focused on development of the chromosome-sorting process, a key early step in the nanofluidics system under development.

Then on Sept. 27, BioNanomatrix announced that it had won an $8.8 million grant from the National Institute of Standards and Technology for a joint venture with Sunnyvale, Calif.-based startup Complete Genomics , a genome sequencing company. The project aims to develop a system capable of sequencing the human genome in eight hours or less, for $100 or less. To reach the objective, the joint venture would merge Bionanomatrix's nanofluidic platform, called the Nanoanalyzer, with Complete Genomics' chemical sequencing techniques. The project stretches the Nanoalyzer technology "to its extreme, to sequence the genome directly," Boyce-Jacino says. "That's a five-year program."