Listen to this articleBelow is our recent interview with Zack Raborn, Manager, Innovation Partnerships at Cardea Bio:
Q: Could you provide our readers with a brief introduction to your company?
A: Cardea Bio is the biological translator that empowers humanity to communicate with biology – a Tech+Bio infrastructure that uses biology-gated transistors to interpret and interact with biomolecular signals in real time, providing researchers with greater insight into the way systems biology truly works, enabling all of humanity to better understand and interact with biology, and harnessing that understanding to make better informed decisions in addressing the world’s most urgent challenges. Our infrastructure provides direct detection of multiple targets, including amplification-free DNA testing with our CRISPR-Chip and SNP-Chip.
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Q: Any highlights on your recent announcement?
A: This partnership has brought was previously only imaginable in science-fiction—an electronic nose/tongue—into reality, thereby revolutionizing the detection of chemical biomarkers. In combining Scentian Bio’s expertise in insect odorant receptors and Cardea’s biology-gated transistors, we were able to produce a product that can read the language of the chemical compounds that compose any smell or taste. Each smell or taste has a unique “fingerprint” of compounds that now be read as an electrical impulse when these compounds bind to the odorant receptors atop our Cardean Transistors. Such a powerful system will allow us to translate the language of chemical compounds into digital signals to detect toxins, analyze food components and even diagnose disease—all in near real time and at a massive scale.
Q: Can you give us more insights into your offering?
A: At the heart of the Cardean Infrastructure is the Cardean Transistor – a transistor that leverages the power of graphene, a highly electrically sensitive and biocompatible nanomaterial – to directly detect biological interactions by reading the subtle changes in the charge environment around the graphene that happen when a target biomolecule binds to a capture molecule immobilized to the surface of the graphene. These capture molecules are programmed to be highly specific and sensitive to the biology under study – for example a protein, small molecule, virion, or DNA. Cardean Transistors can be combined to create chipsets that can be integrated to work for thousands of different applications and biology types.
We work with our Innovation Partners who study and understand problems, diseases and opportunities on a molecular and systems biology level, designing, building and producing chipsets that can be configured and integrated into thousands of “Powered by Cardea” products and applications to improve lives across human health, agriculture, food and water safety, diagnostics, biosafety and the environment. Whether people are in the field, at the bedside or at the bench, Innovation Partners and end users can use our cloud-based system to access and act on streams of signals anywhere in real time.
Reach out to us at partners@cardeabio.com or on our partnership page to learn more about how you can partner with us to leverage our technology for your unique applications.
Q: What can we expect from your company in next 6 months? What are your plans?
A: As Cardeans, we have the ambitious mission of connecting digital networks with biological networks to further our understanding of life as we know it. We are continuing to commercialize applications for our tech infrastructure at breakneck speed in order to bring it from the lab and foundries into the hands of users, where it can have the greatest impact. With our innovation partners, we are developing products for agriculture, human health, defense, environmental monitoring and more. On top of this commercial-level innovation, we are continuing to work towards more breakthroughs in research and development. Here at Cardea, we are perpetually adding to our capabilities to serve more markets and application areas—look out for more publications and products from us and our Innovation partners in the near future.
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Q: What is the best thing about your company that people might not know about?
A: While it may not appear intuitive at first, the sheer breadth of our technology’s applications is astonishing; although our technology is still in its infancy, its potential applications in the near future remain limitless. An analogous example may be that of the semiconductor itself. Looking back to the birth of the semiconductor industry in the early 20th century, many thought that the technology was only useful in a handful of electronic applications, namely in radio receivers. However, nearly a century later, the technology has become a ubiquitous hallmark of today’s society, used in everything from smartphones to cars to washing machines! Cardea’s biology-gated transistors hold this same potential. With the ability to detect biological binding interactions in a rapid, quantitative, amplification-free manner, this technology has the potential to revolutionize the fields of agriculture, detection & diagnostic tools, pharmacology, genotyping, and environmental monitoring, among others.
