Instant NanoBiosensors
Reviewing the Biobase I came across Instant NanoBiosensors.
InstantNano is one of those companies where I’m not exactly confident of the market size or product-market-fit but even so the technology approach makes me think that’s neat!
Technology
The process is called fiber optic particle plasmon resonance, and as the name implies is like surface plasmon resonance (SPR) but on a fiber!
The thing that struck me about the approach is the simplicity, fiber optic cables exploit total internal refraction (TIR) to transmit light long distances. Because they are so important to communication they are commonly and cheaply available.
While TIR keeps the light within the surface, there’s actually a quantum exponentially decaying evanescent field a few nanometers from the surface. This field is exploited in TIRF microscopy, to allow users to only image a small region of the sample (and ignore the background):