Cambridge Consultants, a 45-year old product development and technology consulting firm, announced that it has provided design and engineering development services for an advanced instrumentation system that rapidly sorts through vast sets of biochemical entities inside RainDance Technologies’ novel microfluidics platform. RainDance’s Nanoreactor™ micro-droplet-based system offers radical improvements in a broad range of markets including drug development, cancer research, and even industrial biofuels by allowing scientists to consume far less precious reagents and cell lines than conventional systems — and process samples at orders of magnitude faster than currently possible.

By delivering the instrumentation in just six months, Cambridge Consultants allowed RainDance to speed time to market – and time to revenues - by several months – and to accelerate its expertise in electronics, optics and fluidics. Through this process, RainDance was able to achieve significant development milestones without recruiting, hiring, and training an in-house development staff. With Cambridge Consultants as sub-contractor for the instrumentation design effort, RainDance remained focused on its core technology, while Cambridge Consultants deployed up to 20 engineers to develop the instrumentation. By the time the effort was complete and RainDance was ready for final integration, the RainDance R&D team had more the doubled – and its core microfluidics technology had vastly advanced.

“Smart outsourcing is the best way for us to get to market fast while simultaneously building our core technology and effectively utilizing our internal resources,” said
Bob Cunningham, vice president, business development for RainDance Technologies. “We want to focus on the development of customer-driven applications for our revolutionary microfluidics platform. Cambridge Consultants’ track record in developing commercially successful products that meet international regulatory standards impressed us from the start, and their systems architecture approach matched our own design philosophy about compartmentalizing a complex design process.”

Excite droplets with lasers, then automatically identify and sort

RainDance was founded by an international team of researchers from Harvard University and other leading scientific institutes in the US and Europe who recognised the inherent value in RainDance’s unique technology – the company’s approach has attracted three Nobel laureates as scientific advisors.

RainDance’s Personal Laboratory System™ (PLS) combines Cambridge Consultants’ developed instrumentation with unique disposable fluidic chips to generate and combine droplets – then optically interrogate and sort them according to assay activity. The instrumentation excites each droplet with lasers and measures the resulting light returned to extremely high levels of sensitivity. Processing samples at up to 10,000 droplets per second, this platform delivers significantly faster, cheaper and more accurate analysis than traditional life science tools. When users insert a pre-programmed fluidic chip into the PLS console, the instrumentation automatically finds the biochemical “needles in a haystack” - sorting and identifying the entities of interest for further analysis. The company plans to deliver reference platform units for early adopter use in spring 2007.

Cambridge Consultants worked with RainDance to develop a modular architecture for both the chip and instrument to deliver a single technology platform for multiple applications. Bob Cunningham adds, “We’re building the personal computer of the high throughput screening world where our customers will be able to readily shape the system for their own specific needs. We’re expecting to be surprised by the eventual breadth of application of our technology.”

Cambridge Consultants helped RainDance to define the requirements and the right system architecture and provided technical expertise in optics, control, electronics, signal processing and mechanical integration to develop the instrumentation.

“Nanoreactor technology is an exciting frontier where today’s innovations could dramatically improve the speed and efficacy of drug discovery efforts,” said
Andrew Diston, head of Cambridge Consultants’ global MedTech practice. “Cambridge Consultants has significant expertise with fast-track, system-level product development of optical measurement systems, and a unique ability to get to the core science of a technology. We are delighted to enhance RainDance Technologies’ efforts in helping to commercialize a microfluidics system of such tremendous potential.”

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Notes to Editors

More information about RainDance Technologies and NanoReactorsTM
RainDance’s microfluidic chips create and manipulate tiny droplets of fluid as “NanoReactorsTM” — miniscule laboratories that screen compounds for potential drugs. The company’s technology platform can generate and combine droplets, mix reagents, apply controlled dwell times, detect assay activity and sort through libraries of droplets at rates exceeding thousands per second. RainDance believes that its technology will provide orders-of-magnitude improvement of overall performance over conventional screening, as it enables screening of larger candidate libraries at radically higher throughputs.