Shrink Nanotechnologies' NanoShrink used to produce superior prototypes

CARLSBAD, USA: Shrink Nanotechnologies Inc., an innovative nanotechnology company developing products and licensing opportunities in the solar energy production, medical diagnostics and sensors and biotechnology research and development tools businesses, announced that its proprietary NanoShrink material has shown to produce superior microfluidic and point-of-care test prototypes in a landmark study conducted by the University of California Irvine's (UCI) Department of Biomedical Engineering.

The UCI findings were published in the article, “Better Shrinkage than Shrinky-Dinks” online on March 24, 2010 in a leading academic journal, “Lab on a Chip,” a Royal Society of Chemistry Journal.

The article highlighted the benefits of prototyping using the proprietary NanoShrink™ material.

An excerpt from the Lab on a Chip article states, “While intricate features are typically realized in these thermoplastics by hot embossing and injection molding, such fabrication approaches are expensive and slow. Here, we apply our shrink-induced approach … to create micro- and nano-structures with cross-linked polyolefin thin films. These multi-layered films shrink by 95% … and with greater uniformity …” Additionally, “With such significant reduction in size, along with attractive material properties, such commodity films could find important applications in low cost microfluidic prototyping as well as in point-of-care diagnostics.”

Shrink intends to use the NanoShrink material as a platform from which users around the world would be able to develop individualized applications in a broad range of industries. This is a similar approach to the one employed by Apple when launching the iPhone as a result of the thousands of applications, which have resulted from third party development of the iPhone platform.

Shrink intends to facilitate development by continuing to innovate and provide the NanoShrink user base with NanoShrink in a multitude of formats – plain, metalized, doped or impregnated, single and multi-layered, surface treated and surface structured.

NanoShrink will come in a variety of sizes and characteristics depending on the desired performance characteristics. Moreover, Shrink will provide a web-based user community to facilitate collaboration and dissemination of the important science being performed using the NanoShrink™ platform and materials.

Shrink Nanotechnologies CEO, Mark L. Baum, stated: “In terms of explaining NanoShrink as a product, because many of the identified uses are ‘single use’ – particularly the biological, life science and diagnostics applications – one could view the material as a ‘throw away’ – almost like a razor blade, which is used to create a desired device and then disposed of.

“As more uses are identified and as more applications are prototyped in the material, it will be Shrink’s job to provide the market with the NanoShrink material, to aggressively innovate the NanoShrink product line and facilitate collaboration between NanoShrink users.”

The company believes that growth for the NanoShrink material will be facilitated as the NanoShrink user base collaborates and publishes – in the same manner that Dr. Khine wrote the present Lab on a Chip article. When potential NanoShrink users read this article, they will want to replicate the studies and design additional experiments on their own. This “spiraling” or “viral” effect will hopefully create greater demand for NanoShrink material.

While the NanoShrink community of users is growing, Shrink will also continue to internally develop additional proprietary applications for NanoShrink material – in the biotechnology research tools space, for human and animal diagnostics, environmental sensors and lastly as a base material for Shrink’s unique and patent-pending solar concentrator designs.

The company continues to find important applications for NanoShrink and looks forward to revealing additional applications as they are closer to commercialization. Shrink does intend to discuss the first commercial NanoShrink based devices in more detail in short order, as they are closer to being offered in the market.