 The lab-on-a-chip will soon be a key component in simple and low-cost instrumentation that will eventually replace current technology and make a wide range of analyses easily available. |
 Åmic AB Founded: 1998 Publicly listed: No Number of employees: 25 Key business area(s): Development and production of Bio-MEMS components Telephone: +46 18 521 640 Website Contact |
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| Nanolaboratories cut costs, save time For decades microchips have allowed the miniaturization of electrical circuitry. Now they are coming round a second time as platforms for biotech experiments. Using the minutest quantities of reagents, so called nanolaboratories allow researchers to carry out experiments rapidly and at a significantly lower cost without sacrificing any accuracy. Screening pharmaceutical substances and testing diagnostics are just some of a wide range of applications, when biotech now enters the era of functional genomics or proteomics. “Eventually studying the proteins our bodies produce or should produce could lead to cures for a wide range of illnesses caused by malfunctions in the genetic code. Drugs customized for individual sufferers are not out of the question,” says Ove Öhman, founder and vice president of Åmic AB. Mr. Öhman is an electronics engineer who has worked for almost two decades with biotech companies, like Biacore and Pharmacia. “My main interest has been the development of new systems and formats for biotech applications,” he says. This has led to him being involved in the groundbreaking work of developing the lab-on-a-chip. A lab on a microchip Regardless of application the time-consuming number of measurements to be made and the costs of the reagents involved are the major problems facing biotech companies. The lab-on-a-chip solves this dilemma. Using nanoliter quantities of materials with fluorescent markers and a scanner to follow the reactions, the results from thousands of experiments can be obtained very quickly and economically and easily be processed in a computer to provide the final answer. Human intervention is not needed to manipulate or observe samples and record results. Each chip is virtually self-contained once the reagents have been introduced, and it acts as a miniaturized and automated lab that has been customized for the particular experiment or reaction to be carried out “What Åmic is good at is creating exactly the designs on substrates that its customers need. Irrespective of whether it is for a biotech or electronic application, the development of prototypes or high-volume production of replicated micromechanical, micro-optical and microfluidic components,” says Ove Öhman. By involving a number of sophisticated techniques and combining the accuracy of the processes from the semiconductor industry with the production economy of making CDs, Åmic provides customized solutions with just the high precision/low cost ratio that the industry has been striving to achieve for so many years. |
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