Shrink Nanotechnologies

The Scientist.com: Shrink Dink-idics

ShrinkNano Staff — Tue, 02 Feb 2010 21:33:26 +0000

by Bob Grant

The first year of a faculty position is tough anywhere. But picture starting at a university that didn’t exist the year before, where the equipment you need to conduct your research is nonexistent, and you get an idea of what bioengineer Michelle Khine experienced in her first year at the University of California, Merced (UCM) in 2006.

She wanted to jump into designing and making her own microfluidics chips, which have become the tiny workhorses of biology labs all over the world, to study how the chemokine interleukin-8 (IL-8) helps immune cells find and destroy pathogens. But UCM lacked the clean rooms and sophisticated fabrication equipment that engineers typically use to make microfluidics chips out of silica. In fact, Khine started her tenure working out of a defunct air force base in the next town over. “It was actually really hard in the beginning,” Merced admits. Then a visit to a toy store changed everything.

While brainstorming ways to make microfluidic chips easily, the 33-year-old Khine harkened back to her youth, when she would play with toys called Shrinky Dinks—sheets of polystyrene plastic that children could cut into shapes, color, then shrink to about a third of their size by baking them in the oven.

Inspiration struck. She drove to a craft store, where she found that her childhood hobby was still for sale. At home, she designed a simple pattern on her computer and ran a plastic Shrinky Dink sheet through her laser printer, marking it with a pattern of the channels and wells she wanted on her microfluidic chip. She popped the plastic into the toaster oven in her kitchen.

It worked. The laser printer deposited ink in miniscule lines and dots in the plastic, which shrunk to about the size of a postage stamp in the oven and could be used as a mold to make polymer chips. The next step: Tell her colleagues about her idea. “I didn’t know if this was crazy, if it would be well received, or if people were just going to laugh at me,” Khine says.

“All of the sudden, out of the blue, she comes in and says, ‘I have a great idea,’” remembers Anthony Grimes, a UCM senior who was working in Khine’s lab. Her lab set to work refining the fabrication methods to improve the Shrinky Dink chips—optimizing the shrinking of the plastic, jiggering the printer and oven settings, etc.—and about 4 months after Khine pulled her first prototype out of that toaster oven, she published a paper on the new approach in Lab on a Chip, a publication of the Royal Society of Chemistry and the microfluidics community’s most prestigious journal. (LOAC, 8:170–72, 2008.)

Her Shrinky Dink chips could be designed, printed, and made in minutes for mere pennies with the use of a laser printer and a toaster oven. Moreover, the plastic molds could be used more than 10 times to make chips for testing the behavior of various fluids.

The community went bananas over the paper. “The response was just overwhelming,” Khine remembers. “I was getting phone calls and emails from around the world.”

The editor of Lab on a Chip contacted Khine to tell her that her paper was downloaded 18,500 times in December 2008, 5000 more than any other Royal Society of Chemistry papers published that month.

At her new company, aptly named Shrink Nanotechnologies, Khine has successfully used her shrinking concept to create nanoscale features on diagnostic chips that are smaller than 50 nanometers. She’s also helped to develop StemDiscs, which are nano-scale cell wells fashioned similarly to Shrinky Dink chips that can help stem cells grow and develop more tractably. Kenta Nakamura, a medical student at the University of California, San Francisco, is using StemDiscs to grow cardiomyocytes from embryonic and induced pluripotent stem cells. Khine’s StemDiscs allow Nakamura to encourage the development of more consistent embryoid bodies—balls of stem cells whose size and quality directs differentiation into adult cells. “It eliminates one of the huge variables in the process,” he says. “Technologies like Michelle’s StemDiscs may be one of the key technologies that allows us to control the whole process.”

Word and practice of Khine’s methodology spread so far that one day she received a call from the president of K & B Innovations, the company that makes Shrinky Dinks. “She was wondering what was going on,” Khine recalls. “All these scientists were buying Shrinky Dinks. Labs around the world were buying them in bulk.”

Shrink Nanotechnologies Sets 2010 Agenda for Business Milestones

ShrinkNano Staff — Tue, 02 Feb 2010 21:26:36 +0000

Shrink Nanotechnologies, Inc. (”Shrink”) (OTCBB: INKN), an innovative nanotechnology company developing products and licensing opportunities in the solar energy production, biotechnology research and development tools and medical diagnostics businesses, today outlined key milestones for 2010, which are expected to have a significant impact on the solar, biotechnology and medical diagnostics industries. The underlying technology for all the products the company designs, prototypes and manufactures is a proprietary, patent-pending plastic substrate material called NanoShrink. And this year, the company is rapidly progressing toward the commercialization of products and signing agreements with leading manufacturing and distribution multi-nationals.

“Our first objective once we developed this revolutionary NanoShrink technology – because it had so many applications across various industries – was to determine which sectors had the largest opportunities, offered the greatest growth potential, and had the biggest return on investment for all shareholders of Shrink,” said Mark L. Baum, CEO of Shrink Nanotechnologies. “This led us to focus our efforts on the solar, biotechnology and medical diagnostics industries, where we have the strongest intellectual property protection, and where we believe we could make a unique and high value-added contribution. In 2010, we expect to take the innovations we have developed from the lab to commercialization, where they will help change people’s daily lives.”

Shrink is already in various stages of discussions with leading manufacturers and distributors to bring products in each of its core categories to market in 2010. Management has received positive feedback from large multi-nationals, who are looking to collaborate with Shrink on manufacturing, marketing and distribution. Some of the products being discussed include OptiSol™ (solar technology), StemDisc™ (biotechnology tools) and MetalFluor™ (medical diagnostics).

Products on their way to market

The OptiSol Solar Concentrator is a first-of-its-kind nanotechnology-based plastic solar concentrator and film. Based on electromagnetic non-optical principles, OptiSol enhances the capabilities and efficiency of existing solar cell designs by focusing and tuning the incident solar radiation from the sun for optimal silicon absorption, with less of the total spectrum lost as heat or reflection. In the second quarter of 2010, the Company expects to unveil an initial working prototype and discuss its efficiency as well as potential scaled cost per watt calculation. Because the technology can be easily incorporated into various residential and commercial construction materials, such as roofing, siding, and windows, Shrink is working to establish relationships with leading product design and manufacturing entities in those categories. It expects to have licensing and joint distribution agreements with strategic manufacturing partners in 2010.

In the biotechnology space, the StemDisc and CellAlign family of products are an important biotechnology and stem cell research tool for scientists working to eradicate some of the world’s most medically troubling conditions using the most leading-edge methods of treatment. One version of StemDisc aids in embryoid body (EB) formation. It also allows for a multitude of applications across many currently existing microwell plate formats, thereby increasing the flexibility of use for researchers. Currently, Shrink is working on an agreement to develop dyes and molds for scalable commercial quality initial StemDisc devices. During the first quarter, Shrink expects to provide potential distribution partners with devices to test and shortly thereafter it expects to begin manufacturing product and distributing it through a multi-national distributor.

MetalFluor is an innovative technology for the medical diagnostics field that is designed to inexpensively increase the sensitivity of fluorescence-based diagnostic tests. Shrink is in discussions to integrate its MetalFluor technology with existing leading diagnostic sensor platforms, replacing quartz, silicon, and other glass substrates used in products that measure fluorescent signals. Shrink’s technology has the potential to greatly increase the sensitivity of luminescent based assays, enough to allow low-cost light detectors to be used, enabling more portable instrumentation for point-of-care (POC) testing. POC applications include environmental and medical (human and animal) diagnostics.

Frost & Sullivan: Nanotech Technology Alert

ShrinkNano Staff — Mon, 01 Feb 2010 21:21:07 +0000

OPTISOL SOLAR CONCENTRATOR BASED ON NANOTECHNOLOGY

Shrink Nanotechnologies Inc., is a publicly traded nanotechnology company (OTCBB: INKN) involved in developing products and licensing opportunities in the medical diagnostics field, solar energy production, environmental sensors and biotechnology research and development tools businesses. The company’s renewable energy subsidiary, Shrink Solar, LLC, has recently formed its renewable energy team. This team includes academic and industry collaborators, including Michelle Khine, the scientific founder of the Shrink nano-technology platform; and Sayantani Ghosh, assistant professor, School of Natural Sciences, University of California.

The renewable energy team will focus on product development and optimization, all in an effort to achieve commercialization of the company’s OptiSol solar concentrator.

The OptiSol solar concentrator is a nanotechnology-based plastic solar concentrator. It falls into a class of devices known as luminescent solar concentrators. It is made from layers of the company’s NanoShrink material, nanocrystal “doped” glass and/or plexiglas (poly(methyl methacrylate) [PMMA]). The company has also worked with environmentally friendly corn-based plastics (polylactic acid [PLA]) and has integrated various types of quantum dot semiconductor nanoparticles into this layered structure. The manufacturing process differs slightly depending on the application. For example, “windows” require transparent panes whereas “siding” can be translucent or opaque. The company has also designed unique light trapping and light wave guiding mechanisms into the Optisol system.

Silicon converts the near infrared wavelengths into electricity more efficiently than the UV-Visible wavelengths. However, sunlight is mostly in the UV-Visible spectral region. Sunlight and silicon do not match perfectly, producing heat. The OptiSol solar concentrator makes them match: regular sunlight enters the concentrator and is shifted, emerging as silicon-optimal light. Certain iterations of the materials are transparent and hence there is possibility of light getting transmitted through the concentrator surface rather than getting reflected. There may be some reflections at the Photo Voltaic (PV) Cell- Concentrator interface but total internal reflection effectively traps and re- Nanotech Alert circulates the light within the device which indicates the ability of the device to absorb diffused light and off angle light to some degree. As a result, the loss of the total spectrum as heat or reflection is minimized to a great extent.

The device basically works on two principles namely concentration of the incident light onto a small amount of silicon and shifting of sunlight to illuminate the silicon cell with a better spectrum. The concentration of a large amount of incident light onto a large concentrator surface and then transferring it to a small photovoltaic (PV) cell proves to be an optimal solution since the cost of a plastic OptiSol solar concentrator is much less expensive than the cost of a silicon solar cell which drives down the system’s total cost. Silicon has much higher external quantum efficiency for near infrared (NIR) spectral region than for ultraviolet (UV)-visible region. Shifting of the light from UV-visible to NIR allows the optical energy to be converted more efficiently without any changes to the PV cell itself. The OptiSol solar concentrator offers a number of advantages.

Concentrating solar power systems typically use mirrors, lenses and tracking devices to focus sunlight onto a small photovoltaic device. The OptiSol concentrator however does not employ any of these optical elements. It acts more like a fiberoptic “sheet,” trapping and guiding sunlight to a side-mounted PV cell. Since this design can be achieved using plastic rather than glass, the devices tend to be low-cost, lightweight and durable. While the other competing technologies use short-lived fluorescent dyes; and the materials used in this concentrator have very desirable life spans.

Talking to the Technical Insights team, Mark L. Baum, CEO of Shrink Nanotechnologies said, “One of the biggest problems we ran into was the degrading of our photovoltaics. If we did not solve this problem, the lifetime of our concentrator would have been measured in minutes. Thanks to the efforts of our research and development team, that lifetime has been extended almost indefinitely. While the concentrator itself is nearly indestructible under day-to-day conditions, the actual silicon PV cells are rather fragile. While we have resolved this issue, constantly breaking paper-thin panels was frustrating.”

The major application of the concentrator would be in functionalizing nearly every exterior surfaces of a home or building. The roof, windows, doors, siding, and so on, can all be transformed into power generators, with minimal aesthetic impact. Smaller scale applications would cater to consumer electronics, military devices and recreational markets. According to Baum, the largest market Nanotech Alert opportunity is in a roof-top application and it, like the siding applications, would be an opaque product. Their rooftop application can be completely integrated with the underlying ancillary systems required to make a traditional flat panel silicon PV system work. However, the company also envisions a day when the surfaces (windows and other plastic appendages) of a battery powered vehicle will be functionalized, allowing a commuter to re-fuel his or her vehicle with incident solar light during the work day.

Shrink is funding academic laboratories under a licensing and research agreement with the Regents of the University of California (UC). Through agreements with the Regents of the UC, the company holds exclusive license (for all fields of use) to the core patents related it’s solar concentrator technology. Shrink has also developed additional applications based on the original patent applications and is thus continuing to grow its own IP portfolio. In the near future, the company plans to build ultra low-cost, upgradable and flexible solar concentrators, and will integrate products based on this technology into clean buildings and other nonfunctional surfaces, dramatically impacting our dependence on non-renewable sources of energy.

Gerson Lehrman Group: The Cost of Producing Bioplastics

ShrinkNano Staff — Sat, 16 Jan 2010 20:06:49 +0000

Summary

Oils are extracted from below ground as a feedstock for plastic at the moment, among other things this is a finite resource. Oils extracted from potatoes and algae can be sustained as long as the stock being acquired is not from the food chain. The high price of mineral oil would attract new natural oil producing farmers.

Analysis

If oil does reach a high, (above US $95 a barrel) and continues on an upward spiral there may not be an alternative, other than grow the stock.

Depleting resources will create high prices and this will push innovation. Take plastic, which is used in many applications including food packaging, car parts and building materials, it could be replaced by other material such as ceramics and wood but plastic is an ideal material due to malleable and flexible properties and in some cases its ability to be recycled. So to simply replace one raw material which has been used for years, for another which can be extracted from algae would not be an issue, in fact there would be better control of pricing, due to sustained supply. The other important question is whether there be enough raw material to to produce Bio Plastic, and if the raw material from algae and potatoes can be use in other product such as Bio fuel’s.

Taking algae alone there are many research efforts in the fuel area. The New Biopalstc Association has been launched to catalyze the research and market to the public. Companies such as Shrink Nanotechnologies is one of several companies that is using bioplastics to find a new way of making devices that will minimize the use of increasingly scarce rare metals for its solar concentrator. So the future for bioplastic would be one of organic growth.

Shrink Nanotechnologies Forms Renewable Energy Team with Appointments of Solar Industry Veterans

ShrinkNano Staff — Thu, 07 Jan 2010 16:57:35 +0000

Doctors Sayantani Ghosh & Roland Winston Developing OptiSol™ Solar Concentrator
Disruptive Alternative Energy Technology to Focus on Cost, Efficiency, Upgradability and Environmental Friendliness

CARLSBAD, Calif.–(January 7, 2010)–Shrink Nanotechnologies, Inc. (“Shrink”) (OTCBB: INKN), an innovative nanotechnology company developing products and licensing opportunities in the solar energy production , medical diagnostics and sensors and biotechnology research and development tools businesses, today announced the formation of its Renewable Energy Team, which is comprised of two distinguished academic and industry collaborators, Drs. Sayantani Ghosh and Roland Winston. The team is in charge of developing and laying out a business plan to commercialize Shrink’s OptiSol™ Solar Concentrator. The company believes that solar concentrator technology is game-changing and will be disruptive in terms of cost, increased efficiency, upgradeability and environmental friendliness.

“Shrink’s solar concentrator technology, which does not require mirrors, lenses or tracking systems, is currently going through a design integration process to in effect, functionalize by “solarizing” common surfaces that every American is familiar with. These surfaces and products include windows, siding, roof tiles and other consumer products. We are currently in discussions with leading solar industry companies, as well as other industry and thought leaders in the solar space in order to make our vision a reality. With the additions of Dr. Ghosh and Dr. Winston and the formation of the Renewable Energy Team, we are moving one step closer to achieving our goals and strengthening our foothold in this extremely important, and very sizeable, market,” said Mark L. Baum, CEO of Shrink Nanotechnologies. “The extensive knowledge and experience of these two highly-regarded industry veterans makes all of us at Shrink excited about the possibilities that lie ahead as we begin executing our plan to commercialize OptiSol.”

The OptiSol Concentrator is a new generation disruptive nanotechnology-based plastic solar concentrator and solar film that is a first-of-its-kind in the solar photovoltaic (PV) industry. Traditional silicon solar cells absorb only a small fraction of the total incident solar radiation potential, with a majority of the light either reflected or converted to thermal energy (heat). The OptiSol enhances the capabilities and efficiency of existing solar cell designs by focusing and tuning the incident solar radiation from the sun for optimal silicon absorption, with less of the total spectrum lost as heat or reflection.

OptiSol is an extremely low-cost solution, as efficient as leading technologies, and is upgradeable, allowing customers to either replace or add to their existing installations. The technology can easily be incorporated into various residential and commercial construction materials, such as roofing, siding, and windows. OptiSol does not rely on toxic or hazardous materials and can be made from biodegradable corn-based plastics, thereby offering the first “renewable” renewable energy source.

The appointments of Dr. Ghosh and Dr. Winston are the latest in Shrink’s ever expanding FIGA™ business, where the company brings together some of the world’s leading scientific minds, which includes a network of top experts in the fields of finance, industry, government, and academia.

Renewable Energy Team Member Biographies

Sayantani Ghosh, PhD, is an Assistant Professor at the School of Natural Sciences at the University of California Merced. She has performed significant research and is published in the fields of spintronics, liquid crystal quantum dot ensembles, plasmonics, and photovoltaics. Dr. Ghosh holds MS and PhD degrees from the University of Chicago; a BA degree from the University of Cambridge, UK; and a BS degree from St. Stephen’s College, India.

Ronald Winston, PhD, is a Professor at the School of Natural Sciences and School of Engineering, University of California, Merced. Prior to joining UC Merced, Dr. Winston was a professor at the University of Chicago for 39 years (six of which he served as the Chair of Department of Physics). He is a distinguished physicist and one of the country’s leading solar power experts and has developed technology to produce the highest intensity of sunlight. Dr. Winston holds over 30 patents on non-imaging, radiant energy concentration and illumination. He has also authored more than 150 publications and co-authored two definitive books on non-imaging optics. He holds PhD, M.S., and B.S. degrees from the University of Chicago.

About Shrink Nanotechnologies, Inc.

Shrink is a first of its kind FIGA™ organization. FIGA companies are “for profit” businesses that bring together diverse contributions from leaders in the worlds of finance, industry, government and academia. Shrink’s solutions, including its diverse polymer substrates, nano-devices and biotech research tools, among others, are designed to be ultra-functional and mechanically superior in the solar energy, environmental detection, stem cell and biotechnology markets. The Company’s products are based on proprietary material, a pre-stressed plastic called NanoShrink™, and on their patent-pending manufacturing process called the ShrinkChip Manufacturing Solution™. Shrink’s unique materials and manufacturing solution represents a new paradigm in the rapid design, low-cost fabrication and manufacture of nano-scale devices for the markets they serve.

Contact:
Scott Cianciulli
Brainerd Communicators
212-986-6667
Cianciulli@braincomm.com

Renewable Energy Focus: PV innovations on the leading edge [Excerpt]

ShrinkNano Staff — Fri, 11 Dec 2009 20:17:19 +0000

Future Tech

Some innovations are well past the drawing board stage, but not quite ready to roll into full production. These are some that should be making the news within the coming year.

Shrink Nanotechnologies, Inc., Carlsbad, California produces a shrinkable plastic film. “One for this film is building PV solar cells, but not the type that are normally envisioned. Our technology involves solar concentrators,” Mark Baum, CEO says.

Ms. Sayantani Ghosh, PhD, assistant professor of Physics at UC Merced and consultant to Shrink Nanotechnologies explains that this technology is a completely unique process.

“In a solar cell you take sunlight, and convert it into electricity,” she says. “What we are doing is taking sunlight and converting it into light of a different colour. This different coloured light then falls onto existing silicon PV. The colour of the light is set to the PV’s preferred colour. It is like straining the sunlight into colours that will enhance the efficiency of the silicon.”

“Think about a window. Instead of glass, the surface of the pane would be a very think solar concentrator between two layers of glass. The light of day will hit that solar concentrator. By using crystalline silicon around the edges of the pane, that silicon would absorb the photons coming off the quantum dots in the film. This would be absorbed into the system and ultimately be turned into electricity that could be used. This same technology can apply to home siding and roof shingles. It’s all about functionalising the surfaces of the buildings that people live and work in,” Baum says.

Leading Academic Journal Publishes Scientific Paper on Shrink Nanotechnologies’ Embryoid Body Development Platform for Stem Cell Researchers

ShrinkNano Staff — Mon, 07 Dec 2009 17:02:00 +0000

Company Working with Strategic Manufacturers to Bring StemDiscTM to Market First Products Expected to Launch in First Half of 2010

CARLSBAD, Calif.–(December 7, 2009)–Shrink Nanotechnologies, Inc. (“Shrink”) (OTCBB: INKN), an innovative nanotechnology company developing products and licensing opportunities in the solar energy production, medical diagnostics and sensors and biotechnology research and development tools businesses, today announced that a leading academic journal – Lab on a Chip – has published a paper profiling the Company’s StemDisc technology in the October issue. Shrink’s scientific advisors, Michelle Khine and Kara E. McCloskey, were key contributors to the research, which focused on the work done by Dr. Khine pertaining to the methodology for producing low-cost and portable microfluidic devices.

The article reports on the researchers’ findings of an ultra-rapid fabrication and culture method for embryoid body (EB) formation utilizing a laser-jet printer to generate closely arrayed honeycomb microwells of tunable sizes for the induction of uniform EBs from single cell suspension. These microwells are easily adaptable and scalable to most standard well plates and easily integrated into commercial liquid handling systems to provide an inexpensive and easy high throughput compound screening platform.

“StemDisc has the ability to change the way research is conducted in labs worldwide. We are honored that scientists of this caliber have validated the value of the technology through their extensive research and published their findings in one of the top academic journals in this sector,” said Mark L. Baum, CEO of Shrink Nanotechnologies. “We are currently working with a number of strategic manufacturers to commercialize products utilizing StemDisc and are excited to go to market in the first half of 2010.”

Shrink is made up of some of the world’s scientific leading minds – and includes a network of top experts in the fields of finance, industry, government, and academia. Drs. Khine and McCloskey are both members of Shrink’s scientific advisory board. Khine is the scientific founder of Shrink’s nanofabrication platform. She was recently named by MIT Technology Review as one of the top 35 global innovators under the age of 35 – and by Forbes’ Revolutionaries Series, which recognizes radical thinkers and their world-changing ideas.

Dr. McCloskey is a professor at the School of Engineering, University of California, Merced. She has conducted significant research in the field of tissue engineering with a specific focus on the cardiovascular system and stem cells.

For further information on Shrink Nanotechnologies and StemDisc, and to be kept updated on company announcements, please visit http://www.shrinknano.com/rdbio.php and sign up for the Shrink Technology newsletter.

About Shrink Nanotechnologies, Inc.

Contact: Scott Cianciulli
Brainerd Communicators
212-986-6667
Cianciulli@braincomm.com

Switched: Shrinky Dinks Build Chips on the Cheap

ShrinkNano Staff — Fri, 13 Nov 2009 19:00:27 +0000

by Terrence O’Brien

Do you remember Shrinky Dinks? That’s okay. Neither do most of the Switched staffers — the bunch of whippersnappers they are [Ed Note: Not true. We love them.]. The once-popular, plastic arts-and-craft set, which first hit the scene in 1973, allowed children to color and cut out shapes on a thin sheet of plastic. When the shapes were put in the oven, they would shrink to one-third of their original width, becoming thick and rigid. Well, it turns out that making tacky charms is just scratching the surface of this toy’s potential.

Back in 2006, University of California at Irvine assistant professor Michelle Khine couldn’t afford to outfit her lab with the $100,000 worth of equipment needed to create microfluidic chips. Frustrated and impatient, she turned to an updated version of Shrinky Dinks — one that lets you run the aforementioned plastic sheets through a standard inkjet or laser printer. Needing the chips to create medical diagnostic tests, she took a shot in the dark by printing her chip designs on Shrinky Dinks, and then baking them. When the sheets shrunk, the ink clumped together and formed tiny ridges. She then used the minis as molds for the circuits she made out of a flexible polymer called PDMS.

To her (and everybody else’s) surprise, the cheapo chips worked. They’re not as accurate as traditional silicon chips, but, according to Khine, they work for most applications, cost less than your average fast-food combo meal, and take only a few minutes to make. What, a few years ago, was just a quirky experiment has been more successful than anyone could have possibly imagined. Since that fateful day, Khine has successfully used the chips to grow stem cells in heart muscle, and she even hopes to use them in the field to diagnose diseases like HIV.

Encouraged by her success, Khine has started experimenting with the process. She’s tried layering multiple sheets, scratching out designs with a syringe instead of printing with ink, and even printing with metal — which could potentially be used to build cheap and efficient solar panels.

Just remember this the next time you laugh at that one friend who refuses to throw out her Easy-Bake Oven. That cardboard-flavored-brownie maker might just be used to cure cancer.

BoingBoing: Replacing $100K diagnostic chip fab with Shrinky-Dinks and a laser-printer

ShrinkNano Staff — Sun, 08 Nov 2009 19:00:50 +0000

by Cory Doctrow

CCrawford sez, “Michelle Khine couldn’t afford the $100,000 fabrication gear to make micro-fluidic chips needed for chip-based diagnostic tests. She turned to Shrinky-Dinks and found a new way to solve the problem.”

To test her idea, she whipped up a channel design in AutoCAD, printed it out on Shrinky Dink material using a laser printer, and stuck the result in a toaster oven. As the plastic shrank, the ink particles on its surface clumped together, forming tiny ridges. That was exactly the effect Khine wanted. When she poured a flexible polymer known as PDMS onto the surface of the cooled Shrinky Dink, the ink ridges created tiny channels in the surface of the polymer as it hardened. She pulled the PDMS away from the Shrinky Dink mold, and voilà: a finished microfluidic device that cost less than a fast-food meal.

Khine began using the chips in her experiments, but she didn’t view her toaster-oven hack as a breakthrough right away. “I thought it would be something to hold me over until we got the proper equipment in place,” she says. But when she published a short paper about her technique, she was floored by the response she got from scientists all over the world. “I had no idea people were going to be so interested,” Khine says.

CEO’s Message

ShrinkNano Staff — Thu, 22 Oct 2009 07:08:34 +0000

To Our Shareholders and Friends,

Our team is happy to provide the first of many updates on the progress we are making at Shrink Nanotechnologies, as well as interest you in a few articles that relate to our business. Each time I make a presentation for Shrink, I stress the fact that we are not just a research and development company that comes up with “neat” ideas and “interesting” technology. I always stress that we are a commercial enterprise – we are in the business of making technology and ultimately products that will make people’s lives better and create real value for our shareholders. I hope this newsletter will be a useful format to update interested persons on our progress in this regard and to also identify certain challenges we face as a young and growing company.

For my part, I will try and focus my comments on three categories: (1) People and Relationships, (2) Shrink’s Intellectual Property and (3) Business Focus and Progress.

People and Relationships

I invite you to take a look at the “Team” page on our website: www.ShrinkNano.com. You will see that in a few short months, we have assembled a world class group of extremely relevant scientists and industry veterans in each of our business areas. I will highlight just two active and important members of our team. Dr. Heiner Dreismann is a member of the board of directors of Shrink. He is the former CEO of Roche Molecular Diagnostics, having grown that business more than 100 percent during his tenure, to more than $1.4 billion in sales. Dr. Dreismann presented Shrink at the recent Rodman and Renshaw conference in New York. Shrink continues to utilize the deep industry connections and experience Dr. Dresimann accumulated during his 20+ year career at Roche in order to find the right partners to use our nanofabricated devices and platform for diagnostics applications.

Dr. Roland Winston joined our Science Advisory Board in March of this year. Dr. Winston is the father of non-imaging optics, literally writing the leading academic book on the subject. This science is at the heart of our amazing OptiSol™ technology, which we will be telling the marketplace much more about in the near future. While we have quite a bit of work to be done on OptiSol™, this project continues to be one of the most promising technologies we are working on and one that will hopefully translate very well for our company and our shareholders as we unveil what we have created.

Intellectual Property

Back in May of 2009, we successfully reached a very favorable licensing agreement with the Regents of the University of California. This agreement gave us exclusive access to 9 patent pending applications for all fields of use. As important, over the past months, Shrink has sought to develop our own intellectual property strategy by complementing our rights through the UC agreement and fine tuning specific areas of interest that Shrink is pursuing. Of particular note are the applications we have filed in the areas of metal-enhanced fluorescence (MetalFluor™) and solar concentration (OptiSol™). Over the coming months we look forward to sharing the exciting developments we are making in both of these areas, as well as with other intellectual property we are working to commercialize.

Business Focus and Progress

One of the first obstacles we experienced when our team was starting this journey was coming up with a way to explain what we had and what we wanted to do. It’s not as if we were simply selling hamburgers and hot dogs. Secondly, because we have a “platform” technology to fabricate devices and systems – which is applicable in so many business areas – we had to focus our limited resources on specific areas. The questions we asked ourselves in this process was: “Which businesses have the largest unmet needs, offer the greatest economic opportunity and is a business that we feel we can be impactful in – as soon as possible. We matched thess answers with Shrink’s technologies and develop-able products, which we had the strongest intellectual property protection on, and which we could make a unique and high value-added contribution in. The result of this process was to hone in on Solar Power Generation, Sensor Technology for Medical Diagnostics and Biotechnology Research Tools.

I can say without hesitation that while we have good days and bad days as a young company, and while I wish we were about to reach the proverbial “finish line” with some of the very exciting relationships we are building, our progress towards our goals in our businesses has exceeded my expectations. We have very good, unique and financially meaningful intellectual property rights. We are receiving tremendous press coverage for what we are doing (Forbes.com, Renewable Energy Magazine, Technology Review, American Scientist and much more) and most interesting, we are receiving – and often – unsolicited calls from decision-makers at very large multi-national companies who want to learn about what we are doing and who want to collaborate with us. I have never had such interest from such large companies in such a young company, and I believe that in the near future there is a good likelihood that this interest is going to translate well for our business and our shareholders.

In conclusion, I plan on sending out this newsletter monthly and hope that over time we will be able to send specific newsletters customized to your interest. For example, I believe that soon we will have enough content to provide a solar newsletter, so to the extent your interest is focused on our solar initiatives, we will focus our content on solar. The same is true for those who are keen to only learn about our biotechnology research tools efforts. Regardless of your specific interest, I look forward to working hard for all of our shareholders, broadening our technology portfolio and reaching commercialization milestones with our unique technologies.

I sincerely appreciate your interest in our company and if you ever have any question or wish to make a specific inquiry, please do not hesitate to get in touch with me. I will always try to personally respond to inquiries and your feedback.

Best Regards,

Mark Baum
President and CEO
Shrink Nanotechnologies, Inc.