Invited Paper NM-WeM5
The Challenges and Rewards of Building a Better Biosensor System: The NRL cBASS^®

Wednesday, October 17, 2007, 9:20 am, Room 615

On December 5, 1995 David Baselt, at the time a postdoctoral researcher at NRL working on a cantilever-based biosensor using magnetic particle labels, wrote in his lab notebook, "Did some reading on magnetoresistive sensors. It may be possible to use these rather than piezolevers to detect magnetic particles." Over the past dozen years, a dynamic team of researchers at NRL has developed this idea into the compact Bead Array Sensor System (cBASS^®), a prototype biosensor system that integrates a suite of patented and patent-pending technologies for magnetic labeling and biomolecular detection, biomolecular assay methods, surface chemistry, and microfluidics.^1-9 The current system is capable of multiplexed detection of biomolecules at attomolar concentrations in complex matrices in <20 min with little or no sample preparation. The technology has been licensed for a variety of applications, including food and water testing, environmental analysis, veterinary diagnostics, and biodefense. I will describe the development history of this project, the challenges of moving an idea from concept to advanced development within a government laboratory, and some of the lessons learned along the way.

¹Baselt et al., Biosens. Bioelectron. 13, 731 (1998).
²U.S. Patent 5,981,297.
³Edelstein et al., Biosens. Bioelectron. 14, 805 (2000).
⁴Tamanaha et al., J. Micromech. Microeng. 12, N7 (2002).
⁵Sheehan et al., Biosens. Bioelectron. 18, 1455 (2003)
⁶Rife et al., Sensors Actuat. A 107, 209 (2003).
⁷Sheehan and Whitman, Nano Lett. 5, 803 (2005).
⁸Stine et al., Langmuir 23, 4400 (2007).
⁹Mulvaney et al., Biosens. Bioelectron., in press.