It takes just a moment to do the math. Producing 400 variants costs $40 million, and even if a highly skilled engineer manages to produce as many as 10 promising variants, $39 million will have been wasted on unusable ones, not to mention the many months of work that will have been lost. “Our idea was to develop all 400 variants on the chip simultaneously and automatically perform all the stages of the experiment. In a matter of days we will have comparative results of all 400 variants, enabling us to select the most efficient ones to cultivate in the cells.” Prof. Gerber can perform thousands of experiments on a chip simultaneously at a fraction of the cost mentioned above. As he says, “Our microfluidic chip may be just what’s needed to unplug the blockage slowing down the antibody drug development pipeline.” Bioconvergence—It Takes a Village Although Prof. Gerber’s microfluidic chips are only a few centimeters in size, the system supporting them takes up an entire room, and the multidisciplinary capabilities needed to transform them into a viable product pose a fundamental challenge. To meet this challenge, Prof. Gerber and his transdisciplinary and cross-sectoral ensemble of partners are busy developing flexible and accessible microfluidic-chipbased toolboxes. “Our vision is to develop toolboxes that any researcher and developer can easily operate. At the push of a button, they will be able to choose features from a menu according to their specific needs, be it detecting toxins in water sources, detecting COVID-19 in sewage, or scaling up the volume of experiments that scientists can perform in their labs.” This will enable scientists to shorten the time from the moment their idea is born to proof of concept, exponentially increasing the prospects of success. “In this bioconvergence effort,” says Prof. Gerber, “lies the key for accelerating innovation.” 45
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