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LaserChips® Spectra Systems has created and demonstrated key technologies that enable the automation of both the process development and organic synthesis phases of generating large and diverse molecular libraries for drug discovery. Spectra Systems' patented LaserChip® technology offers an ideal coding platform for bead based solid support combinatorial chemistry. These coding elements are based on the Company's founding technology first reported in Nature1in 1994, which enables narrow band laser light to be generated without the use of rigid reflective optical structures. LaserChips® on a size scale ranging from hundreds of microns to millimeters, can emit ~3nm-wide signals that can be used to create optical domain codes. These materials operate as lasers and are essentially non-saturable resulting in a high signal to noise ratio and very high decoding accuracy and speed. Spectra Systems' readers are capable of performing a complete on-the-fly deconvolution of a LaserChip® in less than 10 milliseconds. Spectra Systems has already demonstrated the use of the same basic materials in high-speed textile coding and sorting applications. LaserChip® code capacities of over 106 are possible within the spectral range of highly developed and integrated silicon-based detector technologies. In addition, coded beads are in a size regime where reagent consumption costs can be considerably less than those required by the RFID technology. At the level of 20,000 new compounds/week, the LaserChip® based technology could result in significant reductions in reagent costs annually.
Another unique and powerful capability offered by the LaserChip® technology is their ability to act as smart solid support chemistry materials. Prototype materials have been engineered whose emission wavelengths shift linearly with temperature. Similar approaches can be utilized to produce LaserChips® that have certain optical bits responding to the amount of product synthesized. The smart chip capability opens the door to a number of possibilities; the most modest of which is sensing reaction conditions to control temperature and the termination of reactions when the solid support is saturated. Additional opportunities of this non-contact sensing capability include interfacing with other commercial devices for parallel synthesis and high throughput screening. 1Lawandy, N.M., Balanchandran, R.M., Gomes, A.S., Sauvain, E., "Laser action in strongly scattering media" Nature 368 (6470), 436 (1994) For more information about Spectra's Products, Licensing or Joint Product Development opportunities, please contact us at:
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