Project type: Innovation

Inventors: Dr Siddharth Ghosh, DAMTP, Dr Moumita Ghosh & Brian Corbett, ICEND
Mentor: Dr. Alex Smeets

The inventors have developed leading edge innovative techniques to manipulate materials at a molecular level (down to 25nm), delivered through a proprietary chip design. This Lab-on-chip combines nanofluidic techniques, single molecule techniques, and semiconductor nanofabrication. The chip is currently targeted at the analytical methods/techniques market (ranging from traditional microscopy to electron microscopy and other emerging microscopy techniques) but has the potential to impact on a wide range of diverse applications including applications such as microscopy through to drug discovery and medical diagnostics through to sensitive sensing technologies.

In the initial analytical methods application context the technology will be delivered as an add-on to existing products such as microscopes, offering compatibility with any microscopy technologies. The chip dramatically improves the performance of microscopy products by enhancing the field of view and focus, enabling real time monitoring of single molecule dynamics thus reducing sample preparation time and research time frames.

For future applications the innovation could enable exciting new developments in nanoparticle filtration, nano-robotics and self-driven nanorobotic vehicles, clean mechanical energy extraction, and novel approaches to computer chip design.

The task for the i-Team is to research a broad range of applications for this technology by interviewing industry and scientific experts, and to recommend short-term and medium-term markets which are open to utilising a new technology of this kind.