Temporarily housed at HARC, a nonprofit research organization that conducts biomedical studies, Genometrix will be targeting its efforts toward developing and manufacturing novel instrumentation for health care and biotechnology that combines microelectronics and molecular biology. Such devices would result in quicker, cheaper diagnostic methods, according to Eggers.
"We want to miniaturize the laboratory--from test tubes to microchips, and from days to minutes," he says.
Currently, Genometrix's researchers are working on developing two instruments: a bioscanner, a high-speed, sensitive instrument to provide images of samples tagged with fluorescent, radioactive, or chemiluminescent labels; and a "genosensor," a square-centimeter-sized chip to perform mutation analyses on DNA samples. Eggers anticipates the bioscanner, which he describes as a molecular "copy machine," to be available within two or three years. The genosensor will take a little longer--three to five years, he says--because as a diagnostic tool it has to undergo more rigorous testing and will be ...
