Biological Research Tools

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Shrink is developing novel biological research and development tools that take advantage of NanoShrink™ and Shrink’s proprietary manufacturing platform, the ShrinkChip Manufacturing Solution™. Our goal is to provide cutting-edge “pick and shovel” bioscience products for academia and industry. Shrink has several application prototypes and multi-generation bioscience tools that employ Shrink’s microfabrication expertise to offer a new paradigm for tools for cell biology, molecular biology, immunodiagnostics and stem cell research. Shrink has had strong interest from multi-national bioscience companies who are presently evaluating Shrink’s various bioscience research and development tools.

Shrink currently has three products in late stage development and second or third generation prototype stages:

The use of stem cells as a research and development and therapeutic platform represents the next milestone in diagnosing and treating human diseases. Much like penicillin and vaccines ushered in new eras of research and medicine, stem cells have the potential to provide new treatments and discoveries for human diseases. Stem cell research has boomed in recent times with a renewed commitment by western governments to fund research in this area. This has led to a boom in stem cell R&D companies. The stem cell market, specifically, can be divided into several key areas:

Each market segment depends on the ability for companies to reproducibly create stem cell cultures for analysis, which is one of the major obstacles facing researchers today. Because stem cells have the potential to evolve into other types of cells, it is important to control the factors associated with differentiation. For the longest time, researchers were stymied by the lack of innovation in stem cell discovery tools, and were forced to rely on old and often unreliable techniques. New advances in cell and tissue culture have shown promise in obviating many of the technical difficulties in stem cell proliferation.

The stem cell research and development tools market is still growing at an accelerated pace. Estimates put a conservative 30% CAGR from now until 2012, with an estimated $423 million market for regenerative stem cell therapy alone.

The size of the stem cell research products market is estimated currently around $872M and is expanding through double digit growth each year for many years to come. The massive size of this market and relative few players creates a rich arena for new companies to gain early traction and provides opportunities for research supply companies.

Currently, there is only one significant company that manufacturers stem cell culture devices, StemCell Technologies (SCT). SCT has developed culture plates that promote embryoid body (EB) formation. SCT’s AggreWell plate is specifically designed to aggregate stem cells into EBs by way of deploying microwells within the growth area. A single AggreWell plate retails for $135, and given that most researchers will use multiple plates per day per experiment, it is relatively easy to calculate the large expenses labs incur.

There are additional new and rapidly evolving markets for products in the tissue engineering field, an area that Shrink is developing into a leading thought leader in making substrates (marketed as CellAlign™ technology) to facilitate the development of substrate or band-aid-like surfaces for biological materials to grow as tissues. CellAlign™ has been used in the lab to grow tissues which grow in the body in a linear fashion – tissues such as cardiac tissue as well as nerve tissue, among others. The market for tools to allow this important research to evolve is expected to develop rapidly and grow significantly.

Lab-on-a-Chip (LOC) is a new and area of bioscience research because of the potential to streamline many scientific applications that normally can take hours to days to complete. Most of the R&D for LOC falls into the applied research area, wherein companion technologies are required for a fully functional chip. The LOC and analytical chip market is still very nascent in product offerings and applications. The US market for analytical chips is currently around $1.7 billion, with a projected growth rate of 17% from now until 2012, and an 18% rate from 2012 to 2017. The high capital costs associated with manufacturing, analysis and the accompanying reagent/software components have seen the market plateau with the current technologies.

Analytical chip formats are unique in complexity; however, a common thread is the type of substrate each assay is performed upon. Current substrates include: silicon matrix chips, glass, nylon and plastic. Current applications often cost several hundreds of dollars for basic reagents to tens of thousands of dollars for complete kits and analyzers. These costs are often outside the budget limits of smaller research groups and start-up companies. A single analysis can represent $30,000+ in capital costs!

The use and analysis of LOC chips represents a high cost for R&D labs, with the greatest cost allocated to the analyzer equipment. With chips ranging in cost from $4/sample to $50/sample and higher, it is evident that the disposable chips represent a valuable resource for the laboratory and logically used sparingly to avoid unnecessary budget shortfalls. Furthermore, most LOC manufacturers will charge premium prices (as well as long lead and fabrication times) for customized chips. This represents an innovation barrier for some labs due to cost.

The LOC market is broad as it is disparate. Of the major companies producing LOCs, each format has its own advantages and disadvantages. Agilent has a wide variety of research applications with the Agilent 2100 Bioanalyzer as a key product. A single representative Agilent chip for RNA analysis costs upwards of $600/chip for 12 samples, or $50/sample. Bio-Rad Laboratories offers a glass chip for protein, RNA and DNA analysis at a cost starting at $13,800 for the analyzer, with a representative chip priced around $400/10 chips, or $40/chip. Probably more aligned with Shrink’s manufacturing solutions paradigm, Micralyne is a company specializing in standard and custom LOC chip solutions with standard disposable glass chips at $300/chip. Custom chips require a minimal order of 5 chips at $1160/chip.

Although the analyzer equipment represents a fixed cost for many laboratories, it is the nature of the costs associated with the chips that determines the best indication on value. Companies that are able to successfully integrate Shrink’s solutions with their current formats will reap the benefits of greater design and production flexibility and supplemental revenue generated from decreased use of supplies and reagents.