SBIR Phase I: A Faster, Cheaper Way to Discover New Drugs: Using Tiny Laser Barcodes to Test Millions of Compounds

Award ID: 2528478

The broader/commercial impact of this Small Business Innovation Research Phase I project is to accelerate public health advancements by democratizing access to advanced drug discovery tools. The new technology may enable the rapid and cost-effective identification of novel medicines, allowing academic institutions and smaller biotechnology companies to pursue challenging or historically difficult targets. By reducing the cost of initial screening by up to 90% and accelerating the timeline from months to weeks, this innovation leverages research spending into neglected tropical diseases, rare diseases, and efforts in pandemic preparedness. Furthermore, the ultra-miniaturized benchtop design of the technology reduces plastic waste and required reagents by over a thousand-fold compared to traditional systems, minimizing the costs and resource footprint of drug development. The initial market segment to be reached will be preclinical biotech and pharmaceutical companies globally that are seeking to validate new targets and require high-quality, comprehensive screening data to inform their lead compound selection. The proposed project addresses the critical gap in modern molecular discovery: the tradeoff between the speed and cost-effectiveness of current high-throughput screening methods and the critical need for high-quality, quantitative activity data. The research objective is to develop a novel, data-rich, ultra-miniaturized platform for quantitative activity screening of chemical compound libraries. This will be achieved by integrating III-V semiconductor laser particles, which serve as unique, narrow-emission spectral barcodes, into polymer beads. These spectrally-encoded beads will then be screened in high-density microwell arrays, enabling over one hundred thousand simultaneous assays at nanoliter volumes. The research will first validate the accurate matching of barcodes across different detection methods (flow-based registration and planar-based scanning). Next, the project will demonstrate the controlled release of model compounds from the beads and conclude by proving the platforms capability to measure the kinetic activity of known inhibitors in a high-throughput, real-time assay. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.

NSF Program Director: Erik Pierstorff