Oh boy, did i have have a bad night, and started with a bad mood...

Oh boy, did i have have a bad night, and started with a bad mood this morning. I was quite the grumpy german this morning being really picky on a few buzzwords, which i usually do not get triggered on, then ranting on them. Well, after some nap time, things are much better now.

I actually sat through Sufi Zafar's talk as well. Awesome talk, very technical and hard to follow at times for me as it is not my area of expertise. I could not draw many conclusions from the presented technical details with regards to the impact on the partnership with Sensera and the joint covid sensor development. But there were a few high-level parts of her talk, that are worth sharing:

@LawyerTrader put it well summarized already in this post:

In her introduction to the second part, where the topics evolved around NanoDx and the license-agreement of them with IBM, some of her introducing words were:




"This work...very happy!...it has been licensed out for a full array of patents. The whole process, we are transferring it to a foundry to be mass produced. And then once it is mass produced., they will change the coating on the top and use it for differen detection including COVID, but the main area is Brain injury markers. We are now at the stage of of mass production."

So her literal words were: "we are transferring" and "We are now at the stage of of mass production". And it was her body language and tone, where contentment and pride resonated in her speech about her and her team's scientfic and commericial achievement. I totally agree with @LawyerTrader to describe her tone as "ebullient".. It could be one of those cases, where a scientists devotion and ingeniuity will lead to achieve something great and meaningful. And as she went on in her talk, she brought the message across why it is such a big achievement:

The Problem, that she comes from and described in a few sentences: BJT (Bi-Polar Juntion Transducers, which she described in the first part of her talk) which are superior over FET in many technical aspects (accuracy, consistency etc) cannot be scaled down to smaller scales (i believe she said < 100nm). With FET (and those that are CMOS-compatible), it is possible to create Features on the SI-Wafer at nano-scale, which is equal to a size of a large protein. But the smaller it is, the harder it gets to fabricate without larger performance variability, when making millions of those features on the Si-Wafer.

Additionally with FET, early diagnotics can be made possible for ultra-low analyte concentrations (e.g. saliva, or processed blood), which is not achieved at higher scales, because the number of molecules in ultra-low analyte concentrations that attach themselves to the sensor are not sufficient to create a sufficient signal response. The Signal-to-Noise Ratio SNR in that regime is dependent on the square-root of the area. Simply said: The smaller the area of the sensor, the more signal you get.





So... the scientific work on FET has been going for over 20 years, but has never resulted in a commercial product, because the there is a huge variation of the sensors all over, which does not make them useable. So it was her scientific spirit to tackle this: "How can we make it better, so that it can be transferred?" ...And that is what she and her team had achieved and licensed out to NanoDx: A Fabrication Process of Nanowire FET, that minizes the sensor-to-sensor variabilities, that has limited its applications. She then proceeded in her talk with the technical details of her work and the results.

So, throughout the talk, i could not find a step of the FET fabrication process where Sensera or any Sensera IP might be involved in the process. The whole content was kept at a concetpual level with no hint how a final product might look like. BUT I got more the notion, that as the sensors get downscaled in size, the handling of fluids at those scales and especially at ultra-low analyte concentrations become more important! And that this gets even more important, once the detection capability shall be extended to more than one analyte in a single cartridge. This obviously becomes more and more the focus of NanoDx:

We all know, that Sensera's expertise lies in the creation of microfluidic components. This post from @Quiltman Post #: 54575467 summarizes it quite well. The microfluidic components processed by Sensera are looking somewhat like this. Doesn't the one chip in the middle look like it is ready to be installed of an array of FET sensors specifically made for multiple analytes ???

I am still in the process of digging into this area and trying to join more dots with the information that is publicly available to make the following statement in Sensera's last release more tangible for us: "The stated announcement with IBM is complementary to the sensor being processed by Sensera"


...to be continued.