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“It’s a great concept. I think it’s been too long for chipmakers to do something for us in the biological sciences,” said Nils Walter, a chemist at the University of Michigan and co-founder of aLight Sciences, a company that is also developing development of single molecules as biosensors, except for its approach. is to use fluorescence, or the emission of light, instead of an electrical signal to read the results.
Roswell is not the only company pursuing chip-based biosensors. For example, Dynamic Biosensors, based in Munich, offers chips with DNA-based sensors that use light. But Roswell’s manufacturing method makes for precise sensors that are flexible enough to envision a “universal biosensor” that could be mass-produced with modern chipmaking techniques, Merriman said. .
At the heart of the Roswell circuits is a molecular wire made of an amino acid sequence that is connected to the rest of the chip like a regular metal 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 strand of DNA, an antibody, or any of a number of other biologically relevant molecules — its electrical conductivity changes. change. The chip records this change and the software extracts the corresponding interaction details.
ROSWELL BIOTECHNOLOGY
To assemble thousands of sensors, Roswell started with a silicon chip attached to prefabricated nanoelectrodes, then used voltage to pull molecules out of solution and onto the chip. This part of the assembly process takes under 10 seconds; In the past, similar molecular processes took hours or even days.
Roswell’s approach can revive some hope molecular electronics researchers had 20 years ago. At the time, it seemed like the small size of the molecules could help make circuit components smaller and computational chips denser. As George Church, a Harvard geneticist and member of Roswell’s scientific advisory board, interestingly explains, a molecular chipmaker can, in principle, “self-assemble,” adding molecules under highly controlled conditions and let them self-assemble into the desired structures. .
The excitement about such molecular properties led to the rapid development of the field of molecular electronics in the late 1990s. It seemed the perfect moment. “There were all these predictions throughout the 80s and 90s, about how silicon would hit a brick wall,” recalls Tour. But it didn’t; Engineers keep pushing. “We are not firing at a static target. Silicon just keeps getting better,” he said. Philip Collins, a physicist at the University of California, Irvine who previously consulted for Roswell, says the subsequent collapse of molecular electrons is quite dramatic: “I would say nine out of 10 scientists research has given up.”
With the new chip, Roswell is instead targeting an application where silicon is not suitable. Molecules are special because “they can be much more complex than binary systems,” says Collins. “They can encode all these interesting different states, like in biochemistry, that we have no other way of accessing.”
The new vision, shared by Roswell and other makers of molecular-on-chip technology, is biosensors that will allow people to check for biomarkers such as vitamin levels or evidence of infection with only a few complexities. It’s a bit more complicated than their current heart test. reviews on smart watches. In Roswell’s case, thousands of biosensors can detect different molecular interactions simultaneously, and the chips will be disposable.
Walter of the University of Michigan notes that while Roswell’s device could house more than 10,000 biosensors on a single chip, having hundreds of thousands or millions of other chips would push the device toward an easy function. market, especially when low biomarker concentrations are detected early. pandemic.
ROSWELL BIOTECHNOLOGY
The commercial biotechnology market is not a new area for Church, Merriman, and other company leaders. But the experience and expertise of the Roswell team didn’t make the company’s funding journey as easy as CEO Paul Mola had hoped. After the company’s January press release, Mola said, he expected venture capital to pour in, but that didn’t happen. Although Roswell has raised more than $60 million to date, mainly from strategic investors and representatives of wealthy families, it had to nearly halve its workforce in February.
Mola is frustrated by the lack of investment in the company, he said, as the company is so close to commercialization. “We felt that we really accomplished so much with so little,” he said. “Now we really need the community to push and support us and take us all the way.”
Mola, who is black, says part of the problem lies in the biotech industry’s troubled track record with diversity—a concern that Stat has reported in early March. “If you think about entrepreneurs and founders, they usually have an entrepreneur in the family, they have network and investor access. From a systemic and fundamental point of view, Black founders don’t have that,” he said. “I don’t have that.”
Roswell is still on track to release a commercial device later this year, Mola said. The startup is about to start its next funding series. It is also introducing a service that could engage customers before it can sell them chips directly: scientists will now be able to send samples to Roswell and have its molecular biosensors do the work. work from home, collect valuable data for example. , real-time function of new drugs.
For Tour, Roswell’s work continues to be emblematic of the rebirth of molecular electronics: “It’s great to be able to see something happen and say, OK, it worked, we just lost more time than we thought.”
Karmela Padavic-Callaghan is a freelance journalist based in Brooklyn, New York.
