SBIR-STTR Award

The ;broader impact/commercial potential of this Small Business Technology Transfer (STTR) Phase I project is the possibility to revolutionize the treatment of cancer through more sensitive and specific cancer biomarker detection. 1.66 million Americans were diagnosed with cancer in 2014 alone, of which 585,720 died. The sum of all health care costs in 2011 for cancer in the US was $88.7 billion. A low cost, less invasive, and more sensitive detector will allow earlier detection of cancer and thus lower the cost of treatment and increase survival rates. Higher sensitivity cancer detection will lead to early detection, enable targeted treatment, and save money and lives while improving quality of life. In addition, the knowledge learned from this grant can be applied to other sensors in which the nanowires are functionalized for detection of materials. These sensors could include sensors to support the Internet of Things, pollution monitoring, and ensuring high water quality.The proposed project will advance our knowledge of using nanowires as detectors. Nanowire sensors have a high surface area-to-volume ratio. Thus their detection limit is dramatically lowered and their sensitivity is increased relative to non-nanostructured sensors. This improvement is necessary for many biological assays. Others have made nanowire sensors and demonstrated high sensitivity. However, the fabrication techniques they use to make their sensors are expensive and slow. Thus, they are only able to get 1-10 nanowires per sensor and manufacturing throughput is low. This project will use a high-throughput and low-cost process, and that results in millions of nanowires per sensor. The nanowires will increase the surface area by over a thousand times thus allowing for more sensitive detection. Instead of using horizontal wires like the competition, the proposed sensor uses arrays of vertically aligned nanowires. The device design solves the typical challenges of contacting large arrays of nanowires and enables the measurement of both optical and electrical signals simultaneously. The proposed project will measure a commercially relevant biomarker for lung cancer. In addition, the investigators will detect two biomarkers on the same chip, thus demonstrating how the technology can be used to test multiple biomarkers on the same chip.

The broader impact/commercial potential of this Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase II project is to further develop improved biosensing for biomanufacturing. Improved biosensing will enable biomanufacturers to better measure the purity of their products and thus develop processes that result in more pure products. Specifically, this phase II project is to develop a silicon nanowire biosensor from proof of concept to a working platform suitable for initial testing and deployment for the detection of host cell proteins in biopharmaceutical manufacturing. An improved biosensor developed in this project promises to improve yields, reduce costs, and improve patient outcomes through higher purity and safer biopharmaceuticals.The proposed project will validate the sensor's use, function, and measurement accuracy in comparison to current methods for detection and measurement. The innovation is a low-cost, quantitative biosensor that can detect many different proteins on the same chip and do so even when the proteins are present at a low concentration level. The company will use vertically aligned silicon nanowire arrays, an inexpensive process to make nanowires, and a device design that eliminates the difficulties in electrically contacting nanowire arrays. The company will fully characterize the sensor's response and compare this response to the metrics that are currently used in the industry. In order to achieve this goal, they will increase the process throughput required to make these sensors, set manufacturing controls to achieve an acceptable consistency in the sensors, measure the response of these sensors over a wide range of protein concentration values, and build a validation package to assist customers in their implementation for using these sensors.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.