NEW YORK (GenomeWeb News) – NanoInk today said it has won a $735,000 Phase II Small Business Innovation Research grant from the National Human Genome Research Institute to develop "nanostructures” that can “enhance the reproducibility, sensitivity, and spatial density of chip-based assays.”
NanoInk said it will do this by developing a patterning methodology based on Dip Pen Nanolithography technology to generate sub-micron sized features on solid surfaces. This method enables materials to be “deposited uniformly in a direct-write fashion on surfaces with nanoscale spatial precision,” Nanolink said in a statement.
“This approach offers significant advantages over current microarray printing technologies that suffer from poor location-to-location reproducibility in terms of size, shape, and biomolecule density, as well as reproducibility across microarray slides,” the company said.
NanoInk said it will also develop a nanoarray fabrication platform consisting of a DPN arrayer, parallel multipen arrays with integrated microfluidic inking systems and appropriate pen and surface modification chemistry "to allow patterning with a variety of biomolecules."