Had a great productive day at Future Diagnostics Conference. First talk was by Prof David R. Walt of Tufts University on Bead Arrays and Single Molecule Detection. Prof. Walt is one of the founders of Illumina, the DNA array company. He talked about the Illumina technology but the more exciting was the new technology platform he is developing for single molecule array or Single Molecule Array (SiMoA™). He has founded another company, Quanterix, that is developing this technology for protein detections in blood. The assay, according to Prof. Walt is so sensitive that he used a term I had never heard of before. The Limit of detection (LOD) of the SiMoA is 22 yoctomole (yoctomole = 10-24 mole)-I guess everyday is a learning day. I will look forward to the day when this technology will change the way we do immunoassay.
