UCSC-led Team Gets $1.6M NIH Grant for Biosensor

A team of researchers led by Holger Schmidt, an associate professor of electric engineering at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and scientists at Brigham Young University, has received a four-year $1.6 million NIH grant to develop a biosensor for potential medical or bioresearch applications.

The technology will integrate into one chip both electrical and optical capabilities to characterize biomolecules and will build on previous work that combined the development of nanopore technology with liquid-core optical waveguides, UCSC said in an announcement this week. Essentially, light is beamed through small volumes of liquids on a chip to obtain measurements both electrically and optically.

The grant announcement illustrates what appears to be a typical path for development of a new technology: it's conceived in academia, and then receives grant support for further development. Then, if successful, at some point down the line, possibly, the technology is transferred to a commercial entity that continues the development and possible commercialization.

It also points to the growing trend to miniaturize this type of technology onto a single-chip form.