Swinging Into Action

Our living room has come alive

We are so excited that we have (finally!) managed to get started with experiments - fabricating some DNA reading systems on silicon nitride wafers in our living room with some Arduinos.

It took us intense reading, chatting with researchers and really long email threads with vendors to identify that the usual methods for fabrication are cost-intensive and unscalable for commercialization. That’s when we decided to take matters into our own hands (quite literally) and make nanopores using controlled dielectric breakdown.

Silicon Nitride Wafers, and looking at them under the microscope

We got our first batch of wafers (images above) shipped in from Europe two weeks ago (thanks a ton, Sohan, James and Koushik for stepping up to support, couldn’t have done it without you all!), procured some electronic components and electrolyte components locally and hey presto we are good to go. I now have a new found respect for supply chains and how cracking those is super important for any hardware company to get their product to market and repeat.

Image Description: Our R&D Lead Ajay figuring out the best ways to pick up wafers using forceps (that had just been delivered by Amazon)

The last few days have been about getting the circuit to work, interfacing it with the code and making sure that it will make the pores in the right spots and at the right voltages. We are still stuck at a bunch of places (and we will crowdsource some ideas for troubleshooting like we did last week) but we are so excited about finally getting hands-on with stuff and hope to have the setup alive and kicking in the next month or so.

Akanksha setting up circuits to make nanopores

A few other interesting updates:

1. We got IBSC (Institutional Biosafety Committee) approval for our BSL-1 DNA editing experiments at CCAMP. This demonstrates that the work we are doing is within the ambit of legal and regulatory boundaries surrounding biomolecule-based work.

2. We won the Tide 2.0 grant from the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY) of India to accelerate our R&D. Super grateful to Sahithi and Aparna in the digital health and technologies program at CCAMP for facilitating the grant application and timely transfer of the grant (unlike a bunch of other grants that are stuck here and there due to some bureaucracy).

3. I am in Kochi, Kerala from 7-11 November for the Emergent Ventures ‘Unconference’ and Akanksha is in Delhi on 6th and 7th December for the regional finals of the Global Student Entrepreneurship Awards. Let us know if you would like to catch up and chat in either of the cities.

We are putting together our company calendar for next year - would be awesome if you could share conferences, competitions, opportunities and readings that you think would help us in our journey. As always, tea/coffee/milkshake is on me the next time we meet!