Sometimes the road to discovery takes unexpected turns. That's the lesson Advanced Gene Tech (
At the show the firm touted new drug targets -- compounds which showed promise for use in new medicine -- but participants showed little interest, instead targeting the company's chip technology.
"Actually, [we] thought our core value was our product leads, the drug candidates we had isolated from the herbs, so we didn't expect ... I mean, [the Herbochip] is kind of a side product, it's not our core technology," said Hsu Li-wei (
The company was so surprised by the attention it received for the Herbochip and its related technologies that, "we didn't have a price list, we didn't have a catalogue, we didn't have a [demonstration]," Hsu said.
The biochip is designed to chemically analyze herbal medicines.
And it made an immediate impact at June's BIO 2001 show. During a recent interview with the Taipei Times, American Institute in Taiwan commercial section chief, Terry Cooke, said US firms attending BIO 2001 were impressed by Advanced Gene's Herbochip.
"A great example [of Taiwan's innovation and research capability] at BIO 2001 in San Diego -- Advanced Gene," he said.
Advanced Gene developed the Herbochip to help speed along their discovery of new drug targets to be used in developing medicines. The company dreamed of taking herbs from Chinese medicine and breaking them down into their basic chemical compounds to see which ones worked against disease and which did not -- a method used by firms worldwide to develop vaccines and other drugs.
Screening herbs takes a long time and a mountain of lab equipment -- at least it did before Advanced Gene developed the Herbochip. The company started with micro plates to research herbs. Micro plate technology -- which contain miniture wells that act like test tubes -- can only test 96 reactions at one time.
This required Advanced Gene researchers to collect far more herb samples and spend large amounts of time liquefying them for use in the micro plates.
"So, about a year ago, we started thinking about what kind of technology we can improve to make the throughput very efficient," Hsu said.
That led to the Herbochip. The company turned to the same technology used in Biochips to sort genes, micro array technology, which miniaturizes samples in order to test many at the same time. Advanced Gene adapted the technology to herbs and other chemical compounds, creating Herbochip, a major time saving device.
"There are some big pharmaceutical companies that say they have millions of molecules in their [storehouses] and they can use our [technology] to do screening much more efficiently," Hsu said. "So, this is the point for our technology. We started to design this chip for herb extractions, but it can be widely used for all chemicals."
The technology used to make the Herbochip, including a special type of plastic, has been patented by Advanced Gene. Hsu said the potential uses for the technology appear limitless at this point, and business offers are rolling in.
RSS