Optokey’s Robert
Chebi (left) and Frank Chen are commercializing a nanoscale sensor
developed at Berkeley
Lab. (Photo by Julie Chao)
Optokey’s “biochemical nose” can be used in food safety,
medical diagnosis, chemical analysis, and a wide array of other fields.
(August 5, 2015) Imagine
being able to test your food in your very own kitchen to quickly determine if
it carried any deadly microbes. Research conducted at Lawrence Berkeley
National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) and now being commercialized by Optokey may
make that possible.
Optokey, a startup based in Hayward, California, has
developed a miniaturized sensor based on Raman spectroscopy that can quickly
and accurately detect or diagnose substances at a molecular level. “Our system
can do chemistry, biology, biochemistry, molecular biology, clinical diagnosis,
and chemical analysis,” said company president and co-founder Fanqing Frank
Chen. “And our system can be implemented very cheaply, without much human
intervention.”
The technology is based on surface-enhanced Raman
spectroscopy, a technique for molecular fingerprinting. While SERS is a highly
sensitive analytical tool, the results are not easily reproducible. As a
scientist at Berkeley Lab, Chen and colleagues developed a solution to this
problem using what they called “nanoplasmonic resonators,” which measures the
interaction of photons with an activated surface using nanostructures in order
to do chemical and biological sensing. The method produces measurements much
more reliably.
“At Optokey we’re able to mass produce this nanoplasmonic resonator
on a wafer scale,” Chen said. “We took something from the R&D realm and
turned it into something industrial-strength.”
The miniaturized sensors use a microfluidic control system
for “lab on a chip” automated liquid sampling. The company is taking a page
from the semiconductor industry in making its chip. “We’re leveraging knowledge
acquired from high-tech semiconductor manufacturing methods to get the cost,
the volume, and the accuracy in the chip,” said VP of Manufacturing Robert
Chebi, a veteran of the microelectronic industry who previously worked at Lam
Research and Applied Materials. “We’re also leveraging all the knowledge in
lasers and optics for this specific Raman-based method.”