A company based on a University of Arizona chemist's research may one day speed drug discovery and disease detection.
The new company, bioVidria, was started by Mary Wirth, UA Professor of Chemistry and a BIO5 member. BioVidria takes microarrays―slides containing collections of molecules that are used to detect other molecules, including those whose presence indicates disease―and coats them with a very thin layer of silica nanoparticles. The nanoparticle-coated microarrays are 10 times more sensitive than microarrays without the coating, and so they can detect much smaller concentrations of molecules―and thus potentially also detect cancers and other diseases sooner than is currently possible. The coated microarrays can also aid in developing drugs to treat diseases, and they can help with other forms of chemical analysis.
