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Biotech / Medical : AFFYMETRIX (AFFX) -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Richard Haugland who wrote (754)	7/8/1998 1:51:00 PM
From: jpbrody	Respond to of 1728

I got a chance to investigate the Argonne/Motorola/Packard chip. It seems that the main man behind this is A.D. Mirzabekov who is at Argonne National Lab. The technology is a way of making an array of polyacrylamide "gel plugs" on a surface. They make polyacrylamide plugs as small as 60x60x20 microns on a hydrophobic glass surface. They call this the "MicroArray of Gel-Immobilized Compounds" (MAGIChip). MAGIChips have dual properties. They can be used as an array of immobilized compounds, or they can be used as an array of microtest tubes 70 nl or more in volume to carry out different physico-chemical processes [hybridization and fractionation, ], chemical reactions [oligonucleotide, DNA and protein immobilization,] and enzymatic reactions [phosphorylation and ligation, ] in all or some of the gel pads. This is from (p1515-1521 Nucleic Acids Research, 1998, Vol. 26, No. 6). It was the most recent Mirzabekov has published. They have patents issued on a way to make these microgels on a surface, a method of dispensing the oligos onto the microgels and the use of the microgels for sequencing by hybridization. patents.ibm.com patents.ibm.com patents.ibm.com patents.ibm.com My take on this whole thing is that it's another method of making oligo arrays. There are many different methods. These patents don't appear to be all that general and shouldn't impede any other companies in the field. In the end, the company that survives will probably be the one that can manufacture the chips the cheapest. If the AFFX claim on greater than 400 probes/cm^2 holds up, they should be able to manufacture much cheaper than others, assuming that cost is proportional to area as it is with the semiconductor chips. -- Jim