Nanosys Co-Founders Publish Landmark Paper Describing the Real-time Detection of Ions and Biomolecules through Advances in Nanotechnology

Cambridge, MA - (August 16, 2001). Nanosys Incorporated reported on the publication of a journal article in Science by Nanosys co-founders and Harvard Professors, Dr. Charles Lieber and Dr. Hongkun Park. The title of the paper is “Nanowire Nanosensors for Detection of Biological and Chemical Species”. Professors Lieber and Park are the senior authors of the paper along with Harvard University graduate students, Yi Cui and Qingqiao Wei. In the journal article, Drs. Lieber’s and Park’s laboratories present their discovery of an exquisitely sensitive and flexible molecular sensing system that detects a broad array of analytes from small ions to nucleic acids to proteins.

The sensor utilizes a tiny nanowire, one ten thousandths the width of a human hair, decorated with specific capture molecules, to detect the presence of minute quantities –- approaching single molecules-- of analytes such as ions, nucleic acids and proteins. Furthermore, the detection is done with simple inexpensive and portable low voltage measurement equipment eliminating the need for cumbersome and expensive chemical labels (such as fluorescent dyes) and sophisticated optical equipment (such as lasers).

“Our work makes it possible, for example, to realize a key challenge of biological sensing, the detection of nucleic acids without the need for cumbersome and costly amplification procedures like PCR (polymerase chain reaction). We believe that this new technology could have a profound effect in both pharmaceutical research and clinical diagnostics, ” said Dr. Lieber, the Mark Hyman Professor of Chemistry at Harvard University.

Professor Park added, “These nanowires can be assembled into arrays potentially thousands of times more dense than current DNA array chips. The nanowire-array detectors have the potential to revolutionize applications in such areas as proteomics and single-cell analysis.”

The Nanosys technology platform, which centers on the nanowire technology, enables a vast range of applications.

“The molecular sensing capabilities of the Nanosys nanotechnology platform represent a single component of the Nanosys vision,” said Nanosys President and CEO, Larry Bock. “Chemical sensing represents a near term product applications for Nanosys platform technology, however our platform has equally strong positions in revolutionizing both optoelectronics, and nanoelectronics.”

Nanosys, Inc. is a newly formed company focused on the development of nanotechnology-enabled systems. These systems incorporate novel and patent-protected zero and one dimensional nanometer-scale materials such as nanowires, nanotubes and nanodots (quantum dots) as their principal active elements. These systems exploit the fundamentally unique electronic, magnetic, optical and integration properties associated with materials having nanometer-scale dimensions. Devices constructed with these systems will revolutionize a broad array of industries from chemical sensing to nanoelectronics (electronic memory and logic) to opto-electronics. These devices will offer radical performance gains in speed, sensitivity, power consumption, device density, and integration

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