James R. Heath, NSBCC Director, along with postdoctoral researcher Rong Fan and graduate student Habib Ahmad, filed an invention disclosure last week.  A summary outlining their invention is below.

This invention describes a generic biomolecule patterning technique and the integrated microfluidic bar-code devices fabricated therefrom that detect multiple, distinct biomolecules, or a panel of biomarkers. Biological molecules are often detected using surface bound bioassays that involves the use of a (primary, or 1^o) surface-bound capture agent molecule (e.g. an antibody or complementary single-stranded DNA oligomer) that specifically recognizes and binds to the biomolecule of interest.

 This invention describes a new method for placing multiple numbers and classes of 1^o capture agents on specific, microscopic locations to create high density biomolecule array. In conjunction with microfluidic systems, it is demonstrated that bar-code array method shows high sensitivity (comparable to the state-of-the-art ELISA assay), broad dynamic range (10⁶, three orders of magnitude larger than most bioassays), and high through-put (tens of proteins can be detected at the same time for 12 specimens in a half an hour). Furthermore, the bar-code microfluidic device has been used to quickly detect a dozen of cancer markers and inflammatory molecules out of small amount of clinic samples – cancer patient sera.