Quanterix and Sony DADC Austria announced this week a deal to develop and manufacture consumables for Quanterix's Single Molecule Array platform.
The consumables will be based on Sony DADC's optical disc technology, which will provide Quanterix "with a consumable that meets the requirements of high sensitivity diagnostic testing," said Quanterix executive chairman Martin Madaus in a statement.
The announcement of the consumables deal is in line with Quanterix's recent shift in strategy to focus on building and selling the SiMoA platform itself after having spent most of its four-year existence focused on building protein biomarker tests for use with the platform (PM 02/25/2011).
The company is currently developing a research-use-only version of the instrument that it aims to launch commercially in 2013, with an IVD platform following in 2014.
The company's protein biomarker work had focused primarily on Alzheimer's disease and prostate cancer, but in anticipation of the platform's commercial release it has expanded its work to other cancers, infectious disease, and autoimmune disorders.
In an email to ProteoMonitor, a Quanterix representative said that at the instrument's launch the company's product portfolio will include consumables "for the measurement of proteins with broad interest to the life science and clinical researcher."
The SiMoA platform works essentially like an ELISA, but uses arrays of femtoliter-sized reaction chambers designed to isolate single molecules, enabling each well to serve as an independent assay for a single molecule.
It uses a detection system consisting of an optical fiber bundle to carry light in and out of each well, a proprietary image-capture device, and image-analysis software to allow researchers to observe the assays on a single-molecule level.
According to Quanterix, the platform offers a 1,000-fold improvement over conventional ELISAs, taking immunoassays down into the sub-femtomolar range and potentially enabling the resulting assays to detect low-abundance protein biomarkers.