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The Chemistry and Reagent Device (CARD™) prototype. |
While some commercial labs are reeling from budget cuts and downsizing, Rheonix, Inc. wants to shrink the lab until it is small enough to fit in the palm of your hand.
The microfluidics firm — formerly an entity of micro-electromechanical giant Kionix, Inc. — has developed a unique system called the Chemistry and Reagent Device (CARD™) that can automatically perform virtually any manual bench-top laboratory function in an area about one-half the size of a standard business card.
Since it spun off at the end of 2008, Rheonix has been collaborating with Antje Baeumner, professor of biological and environmental engineering in the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences, to develop applications for the technology in environmental sampling and healthcare. The intellectual property portfolio in Baeumner’s lab is under license from the Cornell Center for Technology Enterprise and Commercialization.
“You tell it what tests you want to run, and it goes,” says Tony Eisenhut ’88, president and CEO of Rheonix. Using a CARD can amount to a huge labor savings, he says, because a single lab technician can perform the work of many by using the technology, “[creating] efficiency in the system that isn’t there today.”
As a platform technology, the CARD may free up time, money, and expertise in the laboratory with its “sample in, results out” format. Richard A. Montagna Ph.D., senior vice president of Rheonix, hopes to make the CARD more user-friendly by adding electronic readout capabilities. “It’s an exciting aspect of our collaboration with CALS,” he says.
Rheonix has received funding from several sources to integrate medical and environmental research onto its CARD system, including a $1.67 million award from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to develop point-of-care (POC) technologies for underserved and nontraditional health care settings. In rural clinics and disaster-response facilities, for example, the technology could aid in triage, allowing practitioners to quickly determine which patients need the most urgent care.
Baeumner affirms the devices’ potential to streamline POC testing. “A lot of the sample preparation that needs to be done in a test can now be done at the same time without any intervention of the user,” she says.
The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has also shown interest in such POC technologies for their potential to efficiently assess water quality and the presence of water-borne pathogens. According to Baeumner, EPA regulations often make current methods of testing for water quality prohibitively expensive. Baeumner’s work with biosensors may help streamline this process by allowing plant operators to perform tests on-site with huge gains in efficiency.
Rheonix is hopeful for other biological POC applications, including its potential for personalized medicine. A CARD designed to test blood samples for their reaction to the blood-thinner Coumadin, for example, could save weeks of dosage adjustments and “make personalized medicine more attainable,” Eisenhut said. (Chris Bentley '10)
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