Friday, May 08, 2015

Anitoa Demos DNA Sensing with its Low-Light Fluorescent Imager

PRWeb: Anitoa Systems, a Palo Alto startup established in 2011, partnering with Zhejiang University of China, has demonstrated a handheld real time quantitative-polymerase-chain-reaction system (qPCR) using Anitoa's ultra-low-light CMOS bio-optical sensor. Anitoa’s ULS24 ultra-low light CMOS bio-optical sensor is said to be the first commercially available CMOS sensor that has the needed sensitivity to replace photon multiplier tubes and cooled-CCDs in a wide range of medical and scientific instruments. The ultra-low light sensitivity (3e-6 lux) of Anitoa’s CMOS sensor is crucial for achieving good SNR in imaging molecular interactions based on fluorescent or chemiluminescence signaling principle. “We are very pleased to see the test results coming back from partner hospital showing the effectiveness of detecting infectious pathogens. This not only validates the CMOS bio-optical sensor’s ultra-low-light sensitivity, but also its applicability to real world disease diagnostics”, said Anitoa CEO Zhimin Ding.

ULS24 is built on 0.18um CMOS process at "a world-leader specialty semiconductor foundry."

Anitoa’s Intelligent Dark-current Management architecture. It starts with high responsivity photodiodes.
The readout circuit performs multimodal sensing to capture signal and noise information, the A/D and digital signal processor is said to take advantage of the multi-modal information to achieve better noise cancellation.

6 comments:

  1. it is only a image sensor with high sensitivilty?how did it related to DNA sensing ?

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    1. DNA sensing is mostly based on fluorescence or chemiluminescence sensing - sensing of very weak visible spectrum signals in a very narrow band after filtering. Anitoa sensor is optimized for that sort of tasks.

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  2. quantitative-polymerase-chain-reaction system (qPCR) .... focus on volume of DNA ?? not sequencing ??

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  3. True...but qPCR is evolving. The trend is smaller reaction volume, faster reaction time, densely packed reaction sites on microfluidic chips and (fluorophor wavelength) multiplexing. All these put higher demand on imaging subsystem in terms of speed and sensitivity.

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  4. Dear Mr Ding ,this is still a image sensor ,it can be used for DNA sensing application,most image sensor chip can be used for DNA sensing proving enough sensitivilty .The headline give people a different meaning .You can say that after you have used the chip in real DNA sensing and give related results instead of a simple diagram of image sensor .

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    Replies
    1. You can find on Anitoa's web site (http://www.anitoa.com/technology.html) more about the specific set up to test ultra-low-light image sensor for DNA quantification and detection. Having very low detection threshold (e.g. 3e-6 lux @550nm) is important for the sensor to work with a wide variety of proven chemistries, to achieve the required DNA detection sensitivity and specificity for clinical clearance.

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