Intelligent Material Solutions supplies consumable materials, reagents, assays, and licensable nanocrystal crystal platform technology for life science diagnostics.
Our products address Point-of-Care (POC) IVD, and field-based environmental monitoring markets including
in-vitro diagnostics (IVD) medical and life sciences imaging life science research
What Makes Us Unique
Small Size and Small Variability
Our particle synthesis methods result in sizes as small as 3 nm tunable up to 50,000 nm, with a standard deviation of size less than 1%.
Morphology Control
Ability to control aspect ratios and produce photonic crystals in any shape: Rods, Spheres, Hex Plates, etc.
Linkable to Organic Molecules
Our crystals may be conjugated to molecules that interface with nucleotides, receptors, proteins, and other biomolecules.
Stable in Aqueous Solutions
Inorganic crystals are inherently instable in aqueous environments and quickly dissolve. Our crystals contain a protected core that enables their use in biological applications.
IMS’ products make possible an order of magnitude reduction in cost and time per test by minimizing sample preparation and enabling low-cost detection devices that are portable, field deployable, or disposable.
Diagnostic systems incorporating IMS’ crystals offer many advantages over traditional tests that utilize fluorescent materials as the contrast agent.
These advantages include:
- Up-converting crystals offer improved sensitive detection capabilities over other labels. They are also stable for longer periods of time, and multiple labels can be read from the same sample simultaneously.
- A reduction in sample preparation time and cost, an increase in read-out speed, and a decrease in the cost and complexity of read-out equipment.
By leveraging decades of experience in the material processing of our crystals, IMS:
- mitigates risk and minimizes capital expense
IMS expedites market adoption and mitigates market risk by partnering with market leading health care product companies and life science analytical instrumentation companies for product development, sales, service and distribution - expedites product development
IMS Crystal Platform Technology
The fundamental building blocks of IMS products are uniform crystals. The crystals can be configured to accommodate a diverse set of surface ligands – amino groups, carboxyl groups, organic-soluble groups and non-reactive modifications.
The crystals are compatible with established detection and sample preparation methods - bead or microsphere, slide or chip array, probe, microtiter plate and lateral flow.
Our products address a wide breadth of bioassays including:
Molecular Diagnostics
Immunoassay
Flow Cytometry
Cell and Tissue Microscopy
Material advantages include:
- crystals that range from 3 nm to cubic cm in size
- unparalleled conversion efficiency, with high stability in aqueous solutions,
- can be coupled to ligands such as targeting proteins, imaging dyes, and therapeutic agents.
Common platform elements include:
- Lanthanide doped crystals with inherently high energy conversion efficiency and high brightness
- Functionalized coatings for chemical stability and making possible multiple surface binding sites, reducing non-specific binding, and enhancing dispersibility to assay buffers
- Upconversion energy for the elimination of auto-fluorescence from non-targeted, fluorescing biological compounds and making possible the use of low cost NIR and IR excitation sources
- Large anti-Stokes shifts up to 500nm for negligible excitation energy leak through yielding negligible noise, high sensitivity and quantitative assays
- Single excitation source for multiple reporters yielding low cost and low hardware demand multiplexed assays
- Long term photo-stability for indefinite shelf life, consistent repetitive re-analysis and no photo-bleaching
Unique product elements include:
- Crystal size and morphology
- Absorption and emission wavelengths
- Rise and Decay time
- Power Dependence
- Plasmonic Enhancement
- Core/Shell construction
- Biocompatibility with cell and tissue samples, target-to-reporter ratio and particle density dependent sensitivity
- Surface chemistries that accomodate the breadth of biomarkers – amino groups, carboxyl groups, organic-soluble and non-reactive
- Compatibility with established detection and sample preparation methods – bead or microsphere, slide or chip array, probe or dye, microtiter plate and lateral flow
- Functional integration with additional imaging and separation modalities– i.e., magnetic separation and labeling, multiple imaging modalities including X-ray and Computed Tomography (CT)
How We Benefit the Life Sciences Industry
Our products facilitate and expedite the end-user assay development process from fundamental research to innovative diagnostics and therapeutics.
In Vitro Diagnostics
Our IVD products address applications that require high-sensitivity, specificity, reproducibility, low test cost, and low equipment demand. Target applications also benefit from simultaneous detection of multiple markers from one sample, broad dynamic range, and quantitation. Target segments include Nucleic Acid Assays, Point-of-Care, Immunoassays, and Flow Cytometry. In the Point-of-Care segments, analytes found in both blood and oral samples may be targeted.
Non-Amplified Nucleic Acid Labels for Clinical Diagnostics
Amplification-free nucleic acid assays benefit from the performance gains in sensitivity, dynamic range, and photostability that IMS products enable. These assays characteristically require large amounts of sample and reagents, because of high target-to-reporter requirements and because they address the high-volume high-throughput screening applications.
Non-Amplified Nucleic Acid Labels for Point-of-Care Diagnostics
Point-of-Care assays benefit from performance gains enabled by IMS products, as well as low equipment demand and sample preparation, making diagnostic devices simple, low cost, rugged, portable, and in some applications, disposable.
Immunoassay Labels
Immunoassays benefit the performance gains in sensitivity, dynamic range, and photostability that IMS products enable. To an even greater extent, multiplexed assays benefit from these performance gains. Emission spectra are well separated with bandwidths of 25 to 50 nm. Due to this, the absence of auto-fluorescence, and the large anti-Stokes shift, sensitivity is not limited by spectral contamination and excitation leak-through, making quantification feasible.
