A deal to commercialize new technology that may spur advances on fronts ranging from health care and drug development to agriculture is expected to be announced Monday by officials of Argonne National Laboratory, Motorola Inc. and Packard Instrument Company.
The two industrial partners have reached a multimillion-dollar agreement to develop a commercial version of a biochip based on basic research done at Argonne.
Biochips are a hot, new area of research that marries technology from miniaturized electronic circuitry with recent advances in genetics. The goal is to create chips that can interact with biological material to provide instant analysis of the cells being studied.
This technology might one day provide physicians with hand-held instruments no larger than a wireless phone that could produce a profile of a patient’s health based on a few drops of urine, blood and other samples from the patient.
One possible application for biochips that fascinates health care planners is use as a monitor that could alert physicians whenever infectious agents contaminated parts of hospitals to pose a threat to patients and health care workers.
Some biochips are commercially available now, but the one Argonne and its partners hope to develop would be far more useful. The Argonne chip would be three dimensional, making it more sensitive and much faster working than anything now available. Also, it could be reused up to 50 times; today’s biochips usually are used once and then discarded.
Other applications might include helping farmers to determine when a pest is in the early stages of invading their crops, and enabling park rangers to monitor environmental pollutants and to determine whether remediation efforts are working.
Although cooperative research and development agreements among federal labs and private corporations have become common, the size and scope of this one makes it unusual.
Along with executives from Motorola and Packard, high-level officials of the U.S. Department of Energy, perhaps even departing Energy Secretary Federico Pena, are expected to be on hand for the announcement, underscoring the significance that federal authorities see in this deal.
Argonne’s biochip research has been done in collaboration with Andrei Mirzabekov, director of the Engelhardt Institute of Molecular Biology in Moscow. Mirzabekov splits his time between working at Argonne and in Moscow.
Under terms of the five-year agreement with Motorola and Packard, the two corporations will contribute $19 million toward developing a commercial biochip.
The Department of Energy provides funding for Argonne, which is operated by the University of Chicago and located about 30 miles to the southwest of the Chicago’s Loop.
