Technology Description
NN-Labs will commercialize low intrinsically toxic, low cost, biocompatible, and highly permeable doped semiconductor nanocrystals (d-dots) as standard biomedical labeling reagents for biomedical applications. D-dot labels retain all advantages of the intrinsic semiconductor nanocrystal (quantum dot or q-dot) labels, but excludes the usage of cadmium and other heavy metals. In addition, the structural feature of d-dot coupled with the unique ligand chemistry strategies, dendron ligands, successfully developed in the Phase I program further overcome several other key limitations of q-dot labels. Semiconductor nanocrystals are stable, bright fluorophores that, under ideal conditions, can have high quantum yields, narrow fluorescence emission bands, high absorbency, high resistance to photobleaching, and can provide excitation of several different emission colors using a single wavelength for excitation. Because semiconductor nanocrystals have size-tunable narrow emission bands, in addition to single-wavelength excitation, they are suitable for detecting multiple targets in a single experiment. Moreover, semiconductor nanocrystals may be readily imaged using two-photon microscopy in vitro and in vivo. However, commercially available materials, the first generation of q-dot labels, do not yet offer many of the potential advantages of semiconductor nanocrystals. The chief hindrances to routine use have been their toxicities, aggregation, and poor physical permeability. The newly invented d-dot technology (with exclusive patent rights to NN-Labs) produces unprecedented quality of doped nanocrystals, typically with transition metal ions as the doping centers and zinc chalcogenides as the hosts. This technology is fully comparably with the commercialized production technology of semiconductor nanocrystals developed by NN-Labs (www.nn-labs.com), which is known as green chemistry approaches. The success of the Phase I program made it possible to synthesize d-dots protected with dendron ligands, d-dot dendron-nanocrystals. The new generation of q-dot bio-medical labels, d-dot labels, made by these unique nanotechnologies don’t contain heavy metal elements and are ultra-stable, bio-compatible, and also inexpensive. Above all, our cost is much lower than other companies, just $15/mg, which enables our products to reach into a much broad and new market. As the National Institutes of Health referred, nanotechnology has many applications as “nanomedicine” including treatment, diagnosis, monitoring, and control of biological systems. Research into the rational delivery and targeting of pharmaceutical, therapeutic, and diagnostic agents is at the forefront of projects in nanomedicine. These involve the identification of precise targets (cells and receptors) related to specific clinical conditions and choice of the appropriate nanocarriers to achieve the required responses while minimizing the side effects. Our primary application for the proposed technology is in the life science research. Specifically, we will focus on developing diagnostic and detection reagents.
