INNOVATIONS

Description

ATSPIN is a start-up company focusing at the commercialisation of a new "Intelligent Bio-disc Platform (IBP)" based on an electrical-power enabled lab-on-a-disc (LOAD) microfluidics configuration. ATSPIN has integrated a smart power-coupling scheme to drive embedded electronics within a microfluidic disc device while it is still in spinning state. This scheme has enabled a wide variety of sample processing and signal collection steps anywhere within the disc anytime as desired. ATSPIN has developed several IBPs for the biotech industry to perform low-cost high-throughput bioassay including (i) parallel screening of multiple proteins or nucleic acids using centrifugal force-assisted electrophoretic separation, (ii) microfluidic separation of plasma from blood samples, (iii) cell-based allergy screening, (iv) sample-to-answer DNA screening from blood samples. Knowledge and experience acquired from previous university research projects have been transferred to ATSPIN. The company has joined the INCU-TECH scheme of Hong Kong Science and Technology Park in June 2016 to further commercialise its IBP technology, with a specific aim to serve customers from healthcare, R&D research laboratories and academics. Meanwhile, ATSPIN is also actively engaged in developing other smart laboratory instruments for biomedical customers. One example of such instruments is a temperature-controlled miniaturised cell-culture chamber for real-time imaging of cell activities.