Akonni receives $150,000 Phase I NSF grant to assess feasibility of developing lab-on-a-film microarray device

Akonni Biosystems, a molecular diagnostics company that develops, manufactures, and plans to market sophisticated molecular testing devices for diagnosing infectious diseases and human genetic disorders, announced today the receipt of a $150,000 Phase I Grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF). This initial round of funding from NSF will enable Akonni to assess the feasibility of developing a lab-on-a-film microarray device that can be manufactured in a reel-to-reel format.

“The benefit of this manufacturing approach is that lab-on-a-film microarray production and assembly can be automated at very high speeds, resulting in ten to one hundred-fold savings in costs.”

According to Washington G-2 Reports Advisory Services' 2008 Molecular Diagnostics Survey, molecular and genetic test volumes have reached 40 million annual tests in the United States and are expected to double by 2012. This indicates that, with tightening budgets and ballooning projections for diagnostic testing, the next technological revolutions in molecular diagnostics must deliver substantial reductions in per test cost.

"Reel-to-reel assembly is a method of high volume manufacturing used predominantly for the assembly of lateral flow strips and flexible film electronics," said Dr. Christopher Cooney, Principal Investigator on the grant and Director of Engineering at Akonni Biosystems. "The benefit of this manufacturing approach is that lab-on-a-film microarray production and assembly can be automated at very high speeds, resulting in ten to one hundred-fold savings in costs."

If successful, lab-on-a-film manufacturing has the potential to produce highly multiplexed microarray devices for just a few dollars. Combining low-cost production with the multiplexing power of Akonni's gel-drop array to simultaneously interrogate hundreds of diseases markers in a single clinical sample offers the potential to change the economics of patient wellness monitoring and diagnosis of disease.