2024 MIT R&D Conference: Startup Exchange Lightning Talks - Advanced Silicon Group

MARCIE BLACK: Hi, I'm Marcie Black. And I got all three degrees at MIT, so it's good to be back home. Did you know that biomanufacturing, over half of it is dedicated to purifying out unwanted impurities in the process. And these impurities can be toxic in even very dilute quantities. This leads to unnecessary delays and costs in bringing drugs and therapeutics to market. I co-founded Advanced Silicon Group to help lower the barriers for diagnostics so that everyone has access to good health care.

So currently, the biopharma manufacturing industry measures protein using a technique called an ELISA technique. Now, ELISA can efficiently measure the proteins, but it's far from ideal. It's time consuming. It takes about four hours of skilled labor time, and it's expensive. It costs about $400 per test, and can only measure one protein per test. We're developing a small silicon chip that can do this 15 times faster and 15 times lower cost. The end user will simply put a drop of solution onto the chip, rinse it, and then place it into our handheld testing system to measure the protein concentration of interest.

So this market, as I mentioned, for protein sensing, is very large. And there's a lot of pain points in the market right now. So there's a lot of people developing new technology to try to fill this market need. We do three things different. The first thing we do is we do an electrical measurement. Electrical measurements are less expensive than optical. And if you want to do a quantitative measurement, you really need to convert it to electrical anyways in the end. And also electrical, we're really good at measuring very small signals with electrical measurements so it can be more sensitive.

The second thing we do different is we use silicon. And as you'll learn tomorrow, silicon has a wide body of knowledge behind it. This allows us to make use of this knowledge impact many different tests onto the same chip. So we can measure many different protein concentrations in the same test. We can multiplex. Also because we're silicon compatible, we can scale up to manufacturing very easily and increase the throughput pretty as much as we want.

In addition, because we're in silicon, we can make it very small. And the cost of biosensing is dominated by the antibody, or the aptamer, that's used to detect the protein. And since we're going small, we can make it low cost because we can use less antibody. The third thing we do different is we use nanostructures or nanowires. And these have a very high surface area to volume ratio that makes them very sensitive to their environment and can lead to very sensitive detection. So I already mentioned the ELISA where we're faster and cheaper, but there's another protein test that's common that I bet everyone has used, and that's a COVID test, a rapid antigen test.

Those are useful, but they have a limit in how low a detection they can do. And also doing quantitative measurements is difficult with those types of tests. So our sensor will combine the advantages of both of these without the disadvantage. And there's a lot of markets for doing protein sensing. Pretty much any type of measurement that you need that would needs to be sensitive multiplexed, rapid, or low cost are sensor might be a good fit for. We're currently focused on the biopharma manufacturing, but we also have partners in other areas as well.

So for example, we're working with a company growing nerve tissue, and they want to use our sensor to measure for biomarkers to tell how well the nerve tissue is growing. We're also working with a company in India, the KaviKrishna, Institute, to help them measure dormant to tuberculosis in their patients. And we're also collaborating with several biopharma companies, Boston Bib in the Boston area, and also another large biopharma company. Both of which are interested in using our sensor for measuring host cell proteins.

And this is the most important slide of the deck. We're here because we're looking for partners. We're looking for people to scale up semiconductor manufacturing with to develop antibodies or aptamers with us, custom electrical testing, biomedical device design, and bio manufactures. But also anyone who could use a protein test that's low cost, multiplex, and rapid. I have a couple of my-- a couple of our amazing engineers are here. We have a booth. And I welcome you to come visit us. And please join me in lowering the barriers for diagnostics so that everyone has access to good health care. Thank you.

[APPLAUSE]

SPEAKER: Thank you, Marcie.