[Updated at 4:45 pm 11/2/09 to clarify size of NASA Ames sensing device] The U.S. Department of Homeland Security has taken the wraps off a program to develop miniaturized sensor technologies for detecting deadly chemicals—sensors tiny enough to be installed inside ordinary cell phones.

DHS officials meeting in San Diego last week say they have provided total funding of roughly $3 million over the past year for what they call their “Cell-All” program. The funding went to three different R&D groups—including two teams based in San Diego—who successfully demonstrated their prototypes Oct. 27 at San Diego State University’s Regional Technology Center for about 40 government and industry representatives. Among other things, the center serves as a technology clearinghouse and homeland security test bed for public safety agencies in the region.

While implementing such technology is still years away, DHS officials say the concept would make it possible to deploy millions of chemical sensors in the pockets, purses, and belt holsters of cell phone users throughout the United States. Their goal is to integrate miniaturized “sniffer” technology with the mobile handset’s operating system so that a sensor that detects certain volatile chemical compounds would trigger a warning alarm on the user’s phone. At the same time, data about the chemical would be transmitted to first responders and federal emergency operations centers.

“It’s almost like crowd-sourcing the chemical detection problem,” said Stephen Dennis, who is overseeing the Cell-All program for the DHS Science and Technology Directorate in Washington D.C.

Whether a cell phone owner would still be alive after his phone helped to detect, say, a nerve gas attack is another question. But the arguments cut both ways. Japanese emergency services and hospitals were heavily criticized for their slow and uncoordinated response to the 1995 gas attack in Tokyo’s subways. Doctors at many hospitals did not realize they were dealing with cases of sarin nerve gas poisoning until a professor at Shinshu University’s school of medicine recognized the symptoms from television news accounts and mobilized a team to send diagnosis and treatment information by fax. The sarin killed 12 people and sickened thousands.

If such cell phone sensor technology is eventually deployed, Dennis emphasized the system would use an “opt-in” network that would require each cell phone user to activate the sensor in their handset. “We’re very mindful of privacy issues,” Dennis said. “Even though it’s very early in development, we want to send the message that people will control whether or not they want this technology.”

It stands to reason, though, that enough people would participate so that conceivably hundreds, or even thousands, of sensor-equipped cell phones would be present at any given time in shopping malls, airports, public transit systems, and other places where people congregate.

“Instead of large stationary [sensor] systems, you’d have numerous, ubiquitous sensors throughout a region,” Dennis said. “Putting the sensors where people are is a big goal.”

The sensor technology under …Next Page »

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How does $300,000 an hour sound? Walking away with $5,000 for his 60-second pitch, the winner of Thursday night’s MIT $100K Elevator Pitch Contest (EPC), Rouzbeh Shahsavari, seemed pretty excited about it. His idea? Nanoengineered concrete that is twice as strong, cuts CO2 emissions in half, and is dramatically cheaper than typical concrete.

The EPC is the first of three contests that comprise the MIT $100K Entrepreneurship Competition. It will be followed by the Executive Summary Contest and the Business Plan Contest. Now in its third year, the EPC is growing at an incredible rate. With over 350 registrations, we had more submissions this year than in the previous two years combined. As for its capacity to produce innovative ideas, just ask Riccardo Signorelli, the winner of last year’s EPC. Last week the Department of Energy awarded his company, Cambridge, MA-based FastCAP Systems, a $5.3 million grant to develop nanotechnology-enhanced batteries.

As an organizer of this year’s EPC, the experience has been pretty incredible. I distinctly remember how much energy I felt in the room during our kickoff meeting, and things seemed to take off from there. I was repeatedly amazed at the amount of work and energy that my peers put into organizing the events. All of that work finally came together at the finale show Thursday night (for a taste of that energy, see the crowd shot below and the small photo gallery at the end of this post).

The finale really does have a lot theatrics to it. With ”Space” as this year’s theme, the emcees were dressed as astronauts against the background of a giant spaceship made out of PVC pipe (This is MIT after all, what else would you expect?). Audience members clapped thunder-sticks together and shouted “3, 2, 1, Liftoff!” before each presentation. In addition to the pitches, the show featured an interview with the winner of last year’s BPC, Waseem Daher. When asked about the interview experience, he said: “Being a speaker was a lot of fun—it was definitely strange being on the ‘other side’ so soon, because I definitely still see myself in the shoes of the participants…taking a bold new idea—in our case, rebootless software updates—and making the case for it to everyone who is willing to listen (and some who aren’t).”

The format of the event kept the excitement level pretty high as well. The top 10 finalists from each of six tracks (Energy, Life Science, Development, Mobile, Web/IT, and Products & Services) were announced before hand and asked to be in attendance. Of those 60, the top 2 from each track would then deliver their elevator pitch to the audience and judges. However, the finalists didn’t know who they were until their name was announced and they were called down to give their pitch then and there.

During the preliminary rounds I was mainly out front at the registration desk, so I didn’t get a chance to preview many of the pitches. Seeing them at the finale, I was astounded by …Next Page »

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The NanoSteel Company, a Providence, RI-based provider of steel alloys made of nano- and micro-sized particles for customers in the mining, offshore oil drilling, and other industries, has raised $8 million of a proposed $11 million round of equity financing, according to an SEC filing. Investors in the round were not specified in the filing, but the firm’s website lists its backers as EnerTech Capital, Milcom Technologies, and Cycad Group. NanoSteel executives were not available for comment earlier this morning.

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Alnylam Pharmaceuticals is looking to the frontiers of science for ideas on how to best deliver RNA interference drugs throughout the body, and the Cambridge, MA-based company sounds most jazzed about what it sees emerging from laboratories in Vancouver, BC.

Back in May, I wrote about how Alnylam—one of the richest companies in biotech—was leaning on partners at Vancouver, BC-based Tekmira to deliver an RNAi drug that can circulate through the body. Last week, Alnylam said it is doubling down with its Canadian friends. The company has picked a second drug candidate that uses the same technology, and is sponsoring research at a new company made up of four former Tekmira employees who are pushing further on the leading edge of drug delivery, at Vancouver-based AlCana Technologies.

These are important developments to watch, because while RNAi has been one of biotech’s hot concepts for years, scientists still have plenty of work left to prove these drugs can be efficiently delivered. RNAi treatments are thought to be superior to conventional pills because they specifically hit targets on cells that other drugs can’t, and can silence malfunctioning proteins that cause disease. It sounds great, but when small interfering RNA drugs are injected into the body on their own, they get chewed up by enzymes, or flushed through the kidneys long before they ever get to the desired target on diseased cells. Alnylam has worked around this with locally-delivered drugs that don’t have to circulate through the body, but only a limited number of diseases can be treated that way (and that approach poses challenges too, as I described earlier this week.)

Alnylam, and Swiss pharma giant Roche, see big potential to deliver RNAi drugs through the body using Tekmira’s approach, with lipid nanoparticle capsules (sort of like little grease balls, as Alnylam CEO John Maraganore told me last December) designed to protect the drug in the body until it gets to the diseased cells. This is the approach that Alnylam has implemented with ALN-VSP, an experimental drug for liver cancer that is in clinical trials, and it’s the same technology it plans to use for a second candidate called ALN-TTR, for a rare genetic disease called amyloidosis.

“It’s great technology. It works well, you can manufacture it,” says Maraganore. “It’s ready for prime time.”

But this being the leading edge of biology, what’s prime time today can turn obsolete really quickly. I wanted to know from Maraganore what advantages he sees …Next Page »

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After getting a briefing last month from Aculon CEO Ed Hughes, I would not have thought of the five-year-old San Diego startup as a cleantech company. Nanotechnology? Yes. Materials Science? Absolutely. Cleantech? Nah, not really.

Yet Aculon is announcing today that it has developed a formulation of its proprietary nanocoating technology to replace certain applications of hexavalent chromium, a toxic, cancer-causing heavy metal used to make anti-corrosion coatings, as well as stainless steel, dyes, and wood preservatives, among other things. Hexavalent chromium was found in the drinking water of Hinkley, CA, a small desert town made infamous by Erin Brockovich, who was in turn made famous by the namesake film starring Julia Roberts. Suffice to say it is a nasty toxic substance, and a known human carcinogen via inhalation. It can cause kidney and liver damage, along with nasal, skin, and stomach irritations.

Edward Hughes

The Environmental Protection Agency and State of California have banned the use of hexavalent chromium compounds in many applications, although a loophole allows its continued use if there is “no feasible alternative.” So Aculon’s announcement today could be of widespread importance. The company says the use of its nanocoating technology provides that alternative.

It is a little-known fact that paint won’t stick to aluminum, titanium, or stainless steel. So under the “no feasible alternative” exemption, many manufacturers use a chromium-based primer—which is sprayed as an undercoat on baseball bats, beverage cans, bicycles, golf club heads, and electric circuit boards. Aculon says its proprietary SAMP technology, which stands for self-assembled monolayer of phosphonates, can be used instead of hexavalent chromium in paint primers sprayed on metal products.

Aculon was founded in 2004 by Eric Bruner, who obtained his doctorate in chemistry from Princeton University in 2002. The company licensed rights to pioneering work …Next Page »

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North Bridge Venture Partners has committed to participating in a planned $5 million Series A round of financing for stealthy startup MC10, which the Waltham, MA-based VC firm formed last year to commercialize stretchable silicon material, according to MC10 CEO Dave Icke. The stretchable silicon is both flexible in a literal sense and in terms of its potential utility, providing a vast range of possible commercial products for industrial and biomedical applications.

MC10, which is currently housed at North Bridge’s office in Waltham, recently revealed it has licensed the stretchable silicon technology from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where material scientist and MC10 co-founder John Rogers invented the technology and has been developing it for several years. The company’s planned Series A round of financing will likely be led by North Bridge, which has provided seed funding for the startup, and involve one other, unnamed venture firm, Icke says.

MC10 says it aims to deliver the high performance of brittle, rigid semiconductors in a flexible, stretchable material. The technology could be used to embed advanced electronics in products that can conform to moving, multi-dimensional surfaces. For example, this could be useful in putting sensors in …Next Page »

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What recourse does an entrepreneur have when there is no venture capital for a start-up with a truly promising invention? At San Diego’s Biological Dynamics, 27-year-old founder Raj Krishnan’s solution is to win entrepreneur and student competitions—and so far he has won 13 awards, nine of them this year, including most recently a $40,000 first prize in the UC San Diego Entrepreneur Challenge, where the judges were impressed with his presentation skills. “We went to the competitions because venture capital is extremely hard to find now, and we have been fortunate. It enables us now to protect our IP and pay bills,” Krishnan says.

Raj Krishnan talks eagerly about the prospects of someday making a cancer diagnosis no more troubling to a patient than telling someone they have caught a common cold. And the bioengineering Ph.D. student at UC San Diego says he may have found a way to make that happen. Krishnan’s team of fellow UCSD students and professor Michael J. Heller believe they have found a simple and cost-effective way of detecting cancer at its outset.

Nowadays finding a cancer at an early stage usually means it can be cured. But there hasn’t been any method of detecting cancer in its earliest stages. Symptoms usually aren’t apparent until the cancer has reached a late stage of growth.

As cancer cells begin to grow, an increased amount of DNA circulates in the blood. Krishnan says this increase in “cell-free” DNA is believed to be of cancerous origin. In the 1970s, scientists noted that people with tumors have a lot of free DNA in their blood, but serious studies have only been done lately. “There still hasn’t been an easy method to isolate the DNA without degrading it,” says Krishnan. “Ours is the first that doesn’t do that, and it’s a very clear and very easy separation.”

Michael Heller and Raj Krishnan

Krishnan’s research efforts have been directed at creating technology to identify abnormal amounts of cell-free high molecular weight DNA in the blood. High molecular weight DNA is widely considered a good secondary biomarker for almost every type of cancer, but separating nanoparticles of DNA that circulate in extremely small amounts has been problematic, to say the least. This DNA is thought to be of 5-50 nanometers in size, which means it is smaller than the wavelength of light. “It’s very difficult to find in blood. The analogy of needle in the haystack has been used, but I’d say it’s more like looking for a needle on the whole farm,” says UCSD’s Heller, a professor of bioengineering. Krishnan discovered it can be done by generating an electric field through a microelectrode array.

Until recently, using AC (alternating current) electric field techniques to separate nanoparticles such as DNA from blood would have been considered impossible because of …Next Page »

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After filing last month for Chapter 11 bankruptcy, San Diego rapid molecular diagnostic products maker Nanogen has moved to lay off 89 employees by July 14, according to the website GenomeWeb. The San Diego company plans to sell its assets through an auction supervised by the federal bankruptcy court to the French firm Elitech, as we reported earlier.

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Since it began raising its second venture fund several years ago, New York-based Lux Capital has only invested in one startup in the San Diego region—Carlsbad’s Luxtera, which specializes in developing technologies to eliminate the bottlenecks in fiber optic networks for computers. (Luxtera got $26.7 million in a later-stage venture round at the end of last year from Advanced Equities Financial, August Capital, New Enterprise Associates, and Sevin Rosen Funds.) In comparison, Lux Capital counts four portfolio companies in the Boston area: Magen Biosciences, Genocea Biosciences, Cerulean Pharma, and Lux Research.

Perhaps compensating for such imbalance is the fact that Larry Bock, a respected biotech entrepreneur and venture investor (and Xconomist), represents Lux Capital in San Diego as a special limited partner. As a serial entrepreneur who has specialized mostly in the life sciences, Bock has founded 17 companies, including San Diego’s Illumina (NASDAQ: ILMN), Sequana Therapeutics, River Medical, Idun Pharmaceuticals, and Neurocrine Biosciences (NASDAQ: NBIX).

Bock also has become increasingly active as a philanthropist, and was both a principal organizer and sponsor of the San Diego Science Festival, a celebration of science held throughout March. The festival’s events included a session on nanotechnology, which pulled Lux co-founder Josh Wolfe out of his New York orbit. After giving Bock a few weeks to recuperate from the science festival, I recently caught up with both of them by phone to get their thoughts on investment strategy in the current climate.

Larry Bock

When I asked Bock if there would be another science festival next year, he said, “I was a little ambivalent whether I would do another one until the next-to-last day. But then, on the last day of the Science Festival, 100,000 people showed up at Balboa Park and the traffic was backed up for about 8 miles. The police had to close down [access to] the park at 2 pm.”

Bock also noted that having spent 15 months organizing the festival, “I’ve gotten to know every science community in San Diego. Being involved was one of the best sources of venture deals I’ve ever experienced.”

Bock said he met Wolfe more than six years ago, after he developed an interest in nanotechnology. “When I was traveling around to universities and scientific conferences, learning about nanotechnology, the only other VC I’d see was Josh,” Bock said. But Wolfe said Lux’s investment focus extends …Next Page »

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GMZ Energy, a Waltham, MA-based startup developing energy-efficient, nanotechnology materials based on discoveries at MIT and Boston College, has named Aaron Bent to be its new CEO, according to the firm. Bent, whose most recent prior job was general manager of the photonics unit at Andover, MA-based optical switch maker Polatis, takes over the chief executive post from GMZ’s founding CEO, Mike Clary. Clary will remain on the firm’s board of directors.

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Watertown, MA-based QD Vision, which makes solid-state lighting devices based on nanotech “quantum dot” technology, said today it has been awarded $700,000 from the U.S. Department of Energy for a joint R&D project with MIT electrical engineering professor Marc Baldo. The project’s goal is to make organic light emitting diodes more power-efficient and pleasing in appearance, the company said.

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Nano-Terra, a Cambridge, MA, nanotechnology research and development firm, has formed an alliance with Minneapolis-based multi-industry company Pentair (NYSE:PNR) to develop new surface materials for water treatment, according to a press release. Financial details of the alliance weren’t disclosed. Xconomy contributor Neil Savage wrote that Nano-Terra was founded by renown Harvard chemistry professor George Whitesides and others, and the startup has licensed more than 50 awarded and pending patents from Harvard related to the design and production of nanomaterials.

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[[Correction: see editor's note below]] It’s a difficult time for a brand new biotech firm to be drumming up interest in a novel approach to delivering drugs, with investors snubbing so many firms with drugs already in clinical trials. But the market conditions haven’t stopped Elisabet de los Pinos, a former fellow at the MIT Sloan School of Management, from raising more than $3 million in an initial financing in recent months for her new company Aura Biosciences.

Aura, which has an office at an incubator in Cambridge, MA, plans to commercialize drugs based on discoveries at European research institutions. The firm’s particles, made of nano-sized protein shells, could improve delivery of approved cancer drugs by limiting their affects on healthy cells. The startup also sees the ultra-tiny particles as potential carriers of RNA-interference treatments, which firms have had difficulty delivering to tissues deep in the body. The firm wants to license its technology for RNAi drug delivery and develop it internally for treating cancer.

The biotech firm, which still needs to complete animal studies before it can advance into human clinical trials, wants to put the targeting capabilities of its technology to the test in treating pancreatic cancer, says de los Pinos, the startup’s president and CEO. [[Editor's note: this paragraph and the headline have been corrected to say that Aura is developing drugs to treat pancreatic cancer, not prostate cancer, as was initially reported.]]

Aura’s nano-sized protein shell—which can be engineered to mimic how certain viruses can elude the immune system and attach to specific cells—may be able to carry cancer-killing drugs directly to pancreas tumor cells while avoiding healthy cells. The firm’s technology may also be applied to other types of cancer. Earlier this month the firm revealed that it licensed peptide technology from British biotech firm Cancer Research Technology, and de los Pinos says the peptides would be used on the surface of Aura’s particles to target specific cancer cells.

Aura chairman Edmundo Muniz, a former executive of drug giant Eli Lilly and the CEO of cancer drug developer Tigris Pharmaceuticals, compares Aura’s drug particles to long-range missiles.

“Aura’s technology mimics an intercontinental ballistic …Next Page »

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David Lucchino doesn’t like to use the word “coating” to describe the technology under development at his Cambridge, MA-based startup, Semprus Biosciences. Semprus, which was spun out of famous MIT inventor Bob Langer’s lab in 2007, is in the early stages of providing surfaces for medical devices engineered to fight bugs, prevent unhealthy blood clots, or promote tissue regeneration.

Semprus last week announced it closed an $8 million Series A round of venture capital co-led by previous backer 5AM Ventures, which has offices in Waltham, MA, and Menlo Park, CA, and new investor Pangaea Ventures, of New Jersey and Vancouver. Lucchino, CEO of Semprus, plans to use the new capital to advance the firm’s technology. And now I understand why “coatings” is a taboo word at Semprus.

When Lucchino hears “medical device coatings,” he says, he thinks of the silver-based antimicrobial coatings or coatings that leach heparin to prevent blood clots. Semprus uses polymers that form covalent chemical bonds with the surfaces of plastic devices like catheters or metal devices like bone plates and screws. Covalent bonds—for those who don’t remember high school chemistry or didn’t read Luke’s recent story on Avila Therapeutics—are among the strongest in nature.

With these covalent bonds, Semprus’ materials are intended to function on the surface of medical devices for up to 90 days, Lucchino says. That duration beats silver-based coatings, which wear off in a matter of a few days, he says. In the antimicrobial market, Semprus competes with Agion Technologies, a Wakefield, MA-based provider of silver-based coatings for medical devices and numerous consumer products. (I actually bought a pair of waterproof boots coated with Agion’s materials last month.)

But Lucchino (who is the nephew of Red Sox CEO Larry Lucchino) doesn’t want Semprus to become another coatings company, which in some cases means selling materials in bulk to manufacturers. One route to commercialize the firm’s surface technology, he says, would be to co-develop a product with a medical devices manufacturer. He is now in discussions with potential partners.

Lucchino says he believes that catheters and other devices surfaced with Semprus’s materials would fetch more money than those without it. Why? Such devices wouldn’t, in theory, need to be replaced as often as others, and would help avoid expenses due to infections or clotting. “I think the universe is changing,” Lucchino says. “I think the delivery of healthcare is being measured through an efficiency lens.”

There are certainly some who would disagree with Lucchino on that point, but growing U.S. investments in electronic health records and other measures to trim healthcare spending do indicate a move toward efficiency.

Also, give credit to Lucchino and Semprus for closing a first round of financing in an ugly market for early stage venture rounds. (The startup, formerly known as SteriCoat, had previously raised $2.5 million.) And Semprus’s new backer, Pangaea Ventures, is making its first healthcare investment with this deal, Lucchino told me. 5AM Ventures became the first institutional investor in the company last year, and 5AM managing partner Scott Rocklage became company chairman.

Lucchino first spoke to me about his plans to close this venture round in spring 2007, after he and MIT-trained chemical engineer Chris Loose, chief scientific officer of Semprus, won the MIT $100K business plan contest with the pitch for their startup. Even then, Lucchino and Loose were anxious to build a company. Now we’ll see what they can do.

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Two weeks ago, Xconomy broke the news of the Seattle startup EnerG2’s $8.5 million first-round venture deal with Kirkland, WA-based OVP Venture Partners and Palo Alto, CA-based Firelake Capital Management. Today, the energy storage and advanced materials company is officially announcing its approach and giving the story behind its financing. I had a chance to speak in-depth with EnerG2 chief executive Rick Luebbe and OVP venture partner Rick LeFaivre about the company, its strategy, and what it could mean for the future of cleantech ventures, particularly in the Northwest.

As we reported before, EnerG2’s technology originally comes from the University of Washington. It revolves around synthetic carbon powder and “nanocomposite” materials that have novel properties on the molecular scale, such that they are extremely efficient at storing various kinds of energy—electricity, natural gas, and hydrogen, to name a few. I wanted to find out more about how the technology works and how it will be commercialized (think better batteries for tools, vehicles, and mobile devices), but I also wanted to hear the deeper story about the ideas and motivations of the key players and how the deal came about.

The story goes back to 2003, when Luebbe and his business partner Chris Wheaton first got into the energy game. Luebbe had been the co-founder and CEO of the Seattle software firm Hubspan, while Wheaton had been vice president of North American operations at Silicon Valley-based Loudcloud (now part of Hewlett-Packard). “We got interested in energy storage because we recognized no matter which direction the energy economy went, storage would be a critical, critical component,” says Luebbe. And whether it was electrical storage or gas storage, local or mobile applications, the future was in energy. “I really enjoyed my previous career from a business perspective, but I didn’t have same passion I have for clean energy,” Luebbe adds.

Luebbe and Wheaton began looking for renewable energy technologies at the University of Washington that were practical and could be readily commercialized. “We weren’t interested in science projects,” says Luebbe. At the same time, they thought “the most practical way to enter the space was to find a technology that was a market changer,” he says. In other words, they had to swing for the fences. So they met with various department heads at the UW, and were introduced to Guozhong Cao, a professor in the materials science and engineering department, and his graduate student, Aaron Feaver. Cao and Feaver were focused on developing novel materials to generate and store energy. It was a good match.

The status quo in energy-storage technology, roughly speaking, is that you try different natural materials and see if they work. What Cao and Feaver did was use advanced nanotechnology and …Next Page »

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Marlborough, MA-based Xtalic, which develops nanostructured alloys as decorative coatings, as well as to protect against corrosion and wear resistance in everything from tools to sporting goods to electronics, has garnered roughly $10 million in Series B funding, according to PE Hub, which cites a regulatory filing. Investors include North Bridge Venture Partners and Matrix Partners.

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Two local venture firms, Flybridge Capital Parners and General Catalyst Partners, have joined forces with Khosla Ventures of Menlo Park, CA, and invested in Boston University spin-off Sand 9, a start-up founded in 2006 to develop “nano-mechanical resonators” for wireless devices. Flybridge led the $8 Million A series round.

A resonator can be regarded as kind of timekeeper, a very exact clock that makes sure that the circuits in devices such as cell phones, GPS receivers and wireless routers work on the right frequencies. Today’s resonators are based on quartz crystals, just as in most wristwatches, and are fairly big. Instead, Sand9 has developed a technology that can shrink the resonators to nanoscale dimensions, according to the company’s technical founder, BU physics professor Raj Mohanty.

“We can do these components on a much smaller scale and then use them to build switches, filters, mixers and similar components,” says Mohanty. “And as we do them in silicon, it is possible to integrate them with CMOS electronics on the same chip.” CMOS, for complementary metal-oxide-semiconductor, is the leading technique used to build microelectronics.

Much of the initial development of Sand 9’s devices has been carried out at Mohanty’s lab at BU during the last six years, with support from the National Science Foundation. He expects that the company’s first products will be ready for market some time during 2009.

As part of the funding, Flybridge general Partner David Aronoff will join Sand  9’s board of directors.

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Last Thursday, April 24, nanotechnology entrepreneur Anita Goel, founder of Medford, MA-based Nanobiosym, testified on the National Nanotechnology Initiative, a hearing held by the U.S. Senate Subcommittee on Science, Technology, and Innovation. Following is an adaptation of Goel’s testimony.

Nanotechnology to me is the ability to probe and control matter and systems on increasingly finer scales, at the nanoscale and smaller. This is important because it gives us a new level of control over matter. Nanotechnology is a platform science which combines several traditional fields such as physics, chemistry, biology, and medicine. The applications that stem from these capabilities likewise cut across several different sectors from medicine and energy to the environment and materials science. For example, the ability to control the assembly and arrangement of atoms and molecules in a nanomaterial could give it the durability of steel and the weight of plastic.

Nanotechnology provides a platform for innovation across conventional boundaries of science, technology, and commerce. Furthermore, by its intrinsic multidisciplinary nature, it fosters collaboration across conventional political and economic boundaries.

Nanobiosym was founded as an idea lab and research institute to innovate at the convergence of physics, medicine, and nanotechnology. Nanobiosym, and its commercial partner Nanobiosym Diagnostics, have been privately developing Gene-RADAR, a portable nanotechnology-enabled platform that can rapidly and accurately detect genetic fingerprints from any biological organism. The company’s vision is to give patients worldwide real-time access to their own diagnostic information via low-cost handheld devices.

Nanobiosym has been the direct beneficiary of the National Nanotechnology Initiative. We have received multiple rounds of competitive funding grants as some of our technology platforms transitioned from the pure R&D stage to the more applied or prototyping stage. Without the resources that the Initiative brought to bear—not only funding, but also coordination and a sense of national priority—Nanobiosym would not be where it is today.

As the Subcommittee considers how best to update and improve the Initiative, I hope that our experience as an emerging nanotechnology company (in moving across the gamut from science and technology innovation, to proof of concept development and developing commercial products for global markets) will help identify what has worked well and what could be improved to encourage other companies like us.

A Roadmap for Harnessing Nanotechnology to Drive the New Global Economy
The 21st Century Nanotechnology Research and Development Act focused primarily on basic research. This led to dynamic growth in America’s nanotechnology research infrastructure primarily in academic settings, and sowed the seeds of nanotechnology commercialization throughout the country.

Today, five years later, we are beginning to see the results of this initial investment, as nanotechnology-enabled products start to enter the marketplace across the spectrum of industry sectors, from water purification to materials engineering to healthcare. The growth of the next five years could be exponential. The United States has a historic opportunity to drive nanotechnology to maximize its impact on global challenges, including health, environment, energy, and even building the new global economy.

The reauthorization of the National Nanotechnology Initiative should focus on four new areas in addition to basic research:

1. Nanotechnology Education

If America is going to compete effectively in the global nanotechnology revolution, we need a highly skilled and qualified workforce. We need scientists, engineers, and technicians who have a vision for nanotechnology, seek to innovate with it, and are capable of working at the nanoscale. We need professors and teachers who can educate about the nano world, and we need business professionals who can turn the scientists’ work into useful products. It is already difficult to meet the demand for PhDs with nanotechnology backgrounds, and that demand will only increase in the coming years.

Nanotechnology education, like nanotechnology research, is necessarily multidisciplinary. Because nanotechnology spans physics, materials science, chemistry, and biology, it needs to be taught throughout the science curriculum. And like other subjects, nanotechnology is best learned by doing. Programs that improve access to basic nanotechnology tools will help inspire a new generation of students to pursue careers in science because they will be able to see firsthand nanotechnology’s potential.

Our education system must start transcending conventional boundaries between academic disciplines, between academic and corporate training programs, and between U.S. and international training experiences. I would suggest the creation of more international exchange programs. Just as other countries send their students here, we should start sending our people around the world to be trained not only in nanotechnology but its broader international context.

The reauthorization bill will be an excellent investment in America’s future if it promotes nanotechnology education from grade school through graduate school. If it does not, we will continue to rely in the short term on foreign science students who will often end up returning to their home countries to compete against us after completing their studies.

2. Bridging the Gap Between Nanotechnology Research and Commercialization

America’s competitiveness in the global market is being tested in the field of nanotechnology, where Russia, China, Japan, the European Union, and other nations are making major investments in translating basic research into …Next Page »

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