Nov. 6 /PRNewswire/ -- Packard BioScience Company (Nasdaq: PBSC - news) announced today that a model of its next generation biochip production platform will be previewed at today's IBC Chips to Hits biochip industry conference in Philadelphia, PA. The next generation BioChip Arrayer(TM) is manufactured and distributed by the company's newly formed subsidiary Packard BioChip Technologies, LLC and keeps the Company on schedule with its previously disclosed strategic product plans.
The system will employ Packard's patented Piezo Tipnology(TM), a non-contact drop-on-demand piezoelectric dispensing technology. Packard has licensed this printing technology to Motorola, Inc. to aid them in the development of their three-dimensional bioarray platform, as announced early last week. The new system will provide high-throughput biochip manufacturing capabilities to companies interested in producing content biochips and microarrays to serve the pharmaceutical, biotech and diagnostics industries. It is expected to be available commercially mid-2001.
``Inkjet printing has advantages in precision and reliability, and thus is well suited for the production of high-quality chips,'' said Frank Witney, President and COO of Packard BioScience Company. ``Our second generation microarraying dispenser has been redesigned with the input of customers in the genomics and proteomics fields to optimize speed and production capability. With double the number of PiezoTip(TM) dispensers and four times the deck space, this system has a production yield of ten times its predecessor.''
Biochips containing microarrays of genetic information promise to be one of the most important research tools in the post-genome era. They are one of the few platforms that can carry out the highly parallel analysis needed to exploit the explosive growth in genetic information resulting from the sequencing of the human genome. Initial applications will be in drug discovery, pharmacology and clinical research. The emerging field of pharmacogenomics is especially expected to benefit from biochip analysis, eventually leading to mass diagnostic and personalized medicine applications. Other biochip applications will include forensics, toxicology and epidemiological research.... |
