Carbon Nanoprobes, a six-year-old startup induced by Pennsylvania to move its operations from Seattle to State College last year, begins shipping its game-changing product–the world’s tiniest needle–to customers this week. Described by founder Brian Ruby as a paparazzi of the nano-scale world, the company is the first to mass produce probes that can make direct tracings of nano-scale structures–such as biological proteins–and capture finely resolved images from those tracings for atomic-force microscopes.
With its initial product aimed at the semiconductor industry, Carbon Nanoprobes’ consumable tips, a technology long recognized by researchers as a key to visualizing structures on the frontier of nanotechnology, promise to enable that industry to see farther along the path of fitting smaller and smaller transistors into less and less space.
While gaining recognition for its capacity to mass produce the needles, priced at $250 each, the company will seek to expand its customer base to the pharmaceutical industry, where the capacity of nanoprobes to trace the shape of cellular structures offers the potential of a new strategy for drug discovery. With the probe’s capacity to create a precise images of a cellular structure that is the target for the active ingredient in a drug, pharmaceutical researchers will have a much clearer of the picture of the key compound able to fit it.
“This is a totally different approach to drug discovery,” Ruby says. “Nanoprobes make it possible to start with the shape of the lock, look at the drug target in great detail and refine the search for compounds that fit the structure as the basis for drug design.”
While preparing for a move to new headquarters in Malvern, with a focus on meeting demand in the market that has been pent up for almost ten years because of the research community’s recognition of its value, the company is focusing its energies on demonstrating the reliability of its manufacturing process and meeting the demands of customer service, a mission that Ruby expects to grow the size of staff from 6 fulltime (and 2 contract) to 15 fulltime employees by the end of the year, with a further doubling of employment in 2010–positions to be filled by scientists, application engineers, administrative staff and executive hires.
Source: Carbon Nanoprobes, Brian Ruby
Writer: Joseph Plummer
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