Nanosys Awarded Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Grant for Nanotechnology Research

Palo Alto, CA - (March 19, 2003). Nanosys Incorporated announced today the award of Phase I of a 2-phase $1.6M Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) grant from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to the company. The SBIR program is sponsored by the Small Business Administration and is designed to stimulate technological innovation and provide opportunities for small businesses. The grant is part of a special SBIR program to facilitate multidisciplinary work in the field of nanotechnology.

The grant was awarded to further Nanosys’ development and commercialization of a novel biological sensor platform that detects the presence of biological and chemical species by taking advantage of unique properties of semiconductor nanowires. (Nanowires are semiconductor wires that are more than ten thousand times narrower than a human hair). This technology will provide enhance detection of a variety of chemical and biological species at lower cost and less time.

“The award from NIH is a great success for the company and will definitely accelerate the development of these novel sensors toward the commercial market,” said Director of Business Development and Nanosys Co-Founder Dr. Stephen Empedocles. “Nano based sensors have the potential to revolutionize a wide range of medical, research and defense fields. NIH is one of the most sophisticated end-users of this type of product, and this grant is a great validation of the technology”

Dr. Hugh Daniels, Principal Investigator on the grant said, “We have put together a multidisciplinary team of biologists, chemists, material scientists and device engineers to collaborate on this effort. The unique properties of semiconductor nanowires provide a perfect platform to make molecular diagnostic systems smaller, more sensitive, more selective and simpler than existing systems. The whole Nanosys team is committed to bringing this technology to market”

About Dr. Daniels

Dr. Daniels is a Senior R&D Scientist and Program Manager at Nanosys. Prior to joining Nanosys, he was a Project Manager working on developing enzymatic and other biochemical assays for a microfluidics based high-throughput screening platform at Caliper Technologies. Prior to Caliper, he was a Principal Scientist at Quantum Dot Corporation responsible for the development of innovative protein and cell based assays utilizing semiconductor nanocrystals as novel probes. Dr. Daniels also served as a Senior Research Fellow at the Scripps Research Institute. He received his Ph.D. in Biochemistry from University of Wales and his B.S. in Cell Biology from University of Glasgow, United Kingdom. Dr. Daniels is the recipient of the Yamanouchi Post-Doctoral Research Fellowship and has co-authored 23 publications and numerous patents.

About Nanosys

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 inorganic semiconductor materials such as nanowires, nanotubes and nanocrystals (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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