Stilla Technologies

A few weeks back Biorad announced that they are going to acquire Stilla Technologies for $275M.

Stilla Technologies is a ddPCR company, but their approach has a few of novel aspects.

dPCR

dPCR is broadly marketed as qPCR but better. As the name suggests PCR is… a chain reaction. qPCR monitors this amplification process, producing rapidly increasing amplification curves:

Unlike qPCR, dPCR gives a single molecule readout (using amplified material).

It does this by isolating single DNA fragments to individual reaction vessels before amplification. Typically individual droplets.

Amplified material can then be detected on a droplet-by-droplet basis. But rather than a continuous measurement/threshold cycle you are simply measuring “amplification”/”no amplification” on a droplet-by-droplet basis.

By counting droplets, and applying some poisson statistics you can quantify the number of target molecules in a sample.

Stilla - Droplet Arrays

Typically a ddPCR system needs three instruments, for example in Biorad’s system:

• A droplet generator

• A thermal cycler (to do the PCR in the droplets)

• A droplet reader

Here droplet detection works by flowing droplets part a detector:

The Stilla instrument combines these processes, building the system around droplet arrays: