›› Looking at it from East Montview Boulevard, the Fitzsimons BioScience Park Center looks like any other office building. But inside, the building is home to the Fitzsimons Redevelopment Authority and a roster of bioscience companies churning out dozens of groundbreaking devices, treatments and other new technologies.
Here’s a look at five cool inventions scientists at the FRA’s headquarters are developing.
Beacon Biotechnology Scientists at Beacon Biotechnology are working to arm doctors with technology that can screen for more than 100 different ailments, including cancer and AIDS, all with a finger prick and the time it takes to get your oil changed.
The company’s BrightSPOT product uses an acutely sensitive test strip attached to a computer chip to run 112 different tests from a single sample. All doctors have to do is place a drop of blood on the strip and connect the device to a computer. The chip is smaller than a business card and could even attach to a smart phone. BrightSPOT isn’t limited to medical tests, either.
The small green chip can also test food for dozens of pathogens, including different types of salmonella or listeria. Those tests can happen in about 30 minutes. That could have major impacts on the fresh produce business, because now, tests for such dangers such typically take from 24 hours to several days to complete.
One day, Beacon would like its product in the hands of farmers who can take a small sample from their cantaloupe or watermelon, place it on the BrightSPOT, and before the truck leaves the farm know if there are any dangerous organisms on it.
Sharklet Ever see a Great White with a cold? What about a hammerhead with the sniffles? Didn’t think so. And it’s not just sharks’ dedication to clean living that keeps them swimming the world’s oceans as healthy as can be. It’s also their skin.
The smooth exterior of a shark is covered with a microscopic pattern that makes it a very unfriendly place for microorganisms. If they can’t hang around and multiply, they can’t get the shark sick, either.
At Sharklet Technologies, scientists are developing a microscopic pattern similar to a shark’s skin that makes it hard for microorganisms to thrive on a given surface. The pattern can be applied to virtually any surface, either via an adhesive covering or by molding the pattern into the product itself.
That means bacteria farms such the bed rails in a hospital or push panels on an elementary school door could one day be pretty unpleasant for microorganisms.
The technology could have the added benefit of making antibacterial soaps, bleaches and disinfectants — harsh chemicals that some scientists say have led to the prevalence of drug-resistant “super bugs” — far less common in our schools or hospitals.
PolyNew Chances are you took a swig from a plastic bottle today or scooped your lunch out of a plastic dish. And that plastic probably ended up in a trashcan, wrapping up a life cycle that started as grimy petroleum pumped from the earth. But it doesn’t have to be that way.
Scientists at PolyNew Inc. are developing plastics that tackle the landfill-stuffing, petroleum-heavy substance from both sides. First, PolyNew’s plastic is biodegradable — so it won’t take up space in a landfill for hundreds of years. And second, it skips the petro-chemical scene in favor of plastic built from renewable materials. Specifically, PolyNew relies on plastics made from polylactic acid, a corn-based product, but the brainiacs there say they could also be made from sugar cane, grasses or essentially any organic material.
And if that wasn’t cool enough, PolyNew’s plastics are compostable, too.
Greffex, GreVac Movies about a coming pandemic always feature the scene where scientists show a map of the United States growing red as the disease takes over.
First the coasts go red, then the major urban areas in the country’s center. Soon enough, the whole nation is a sea of red ink as the virus infects people from the Atlantic to the Pacific.
In the case of a deadly influenza outbreak, that coast-to-coast spread could be particularly dangerous because scientists need about 22 weeks to develop enough vaccine to beat back the virus.
Scientists at Greffex Inc. are poised to ruin those scenes for good.
The company’s GreVac vaccine project could reduce the time it takes to develop vaccines by 75 percent. The project develops vaccines at a cellular level — without the use of chicken eggs — and can roll out 100 million doses in five weeks, and do it all using a few machines that take up about as much space as three standard washing machines.
Granted, five weeks is still long enough for a virus to spread, but the likelihood of it reaching that nightmare, coast-to-coast scenario is much slimmer compared to the havoc it could unleash in 22 weeks.
Aktivax- Immunoject Needle pricks. Wasted medicine at the bottom of a vile. And occasionally an inaccurate dose from a traditional syringe. Anytime you stick a needle into a vial, all of those outcomes are possible.
But with a simple plastic device, AktiVax can make those bad outcomes rare.
The company’s Immunoject system uses a few pieces of plastic and a syringe to deliver medicine in a much easier fashion.
Typically, when a doctor goes to deliver a vaccine, they have to poke the syringe into a vial and extract the medicine, sometimes then mixing it with a liquid. Immunoject teams a syringe with another AktiVax invention, Aseptic Reconstitution Cartridge Hybrids, ARCH. The system uses a plastic packet filled with liquid next to a packet filled with the medicine in powder form. When squeezed, the medicine packet ruptures and mixes with the liquid. The ARCH package can be attached to a traditional needle or to the Immunoject system.
Even if it’s attached to a typical needle the system reduces waste. Some companies lose about 30 percent of their product to waste because the vial and syringe system isn’t particularly efficient. With ARCH, companies will use 90 percent or more of their medicine.
The product likely won’t be ideal for diabetes patients and other regular syringe users whose doses vary from use-to-use. But they could work for diabetes patients who carry a fixed amount of an emergency dose. n