History

IntegenX (formerly Microchip Biotechnologies) was founded in 2003 by Dr. Stevan Jovanovich, Dr. Dennis Harris and Dr. Richard Mathies, with a shared goal to develop efficient approaches to sample preparation for life science applications. Their perspective was that despite the dramatic breakthroughs in biological sample analysis enabled by developments in analytical instrumentation, the upfront handling and preparation of real world samples was lagging far behind. They saw many challenges impeding the pace of basic life science research, and its practical applications. For example, the disconnect between real world sample volumes and modern analytical systems is striking. Samples as large as 10 mL are ultimately processed on advanced instruments such as capillary sequencers and mass spectrographs at the nanoliter scale, so the mismatch causes expensive consumables and precious samples to be wasted. Scientists continue to face difficult decisions to either continue to rely error-prone manual processing or invest in costly, monolithic laboratory automation and robotics systems. Cumbersome fragmented workflows and applications restrict many applications to remote use in laboratories. IntegenX aims to streamline the analysis of biological materials and overcome many of the limitations of previous methods.

Research
IntegenX was initially funded through grants and contracts and still continues to use these funding mechanisms to explore methods in their research phase. Early contracts with the Department of Defense resulted in the creation and deployment of the NanoBioSentinel™ monitoring system for pathogens and toxins. This integrated, cartridge-based system uses paramagnetic beads to capture, purify, and concentrate aerosol and other samples. After the samples are processed, real-time nucleic acid amplification is performed, microchannel capillary electrophoresis confirms putative positives, and toxin samples are processed with fluorescent detection. The NanoBioSentinel was made possible by research breakthroughs using intellectual property licensed from the University of California at Berkeley and our core technologies. This advancement led to the creation of the first IntegenX microchip for nanoliter volume reactions in 2004.

Since then, IntegenX has designed over 70 versions of the microchips for application-specific automation, three generations of paramagnetic bead capture technologies, and three generations of Apollo platforms for automated sample preparation.
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