BioNavis Ltd was established to develop, manufacture, supply and support Surface Plasmon Resonance (SPR) based instruments and biosensors for research and diagnostics. The Tampere, Finland based company was founded in 2006 by private investors and professionals with several decades experience in scientific instrumentation. Currently, the company has Finnish-Italian-Japanese ownership.
History edit
- 1988 – VTT's (Technical Research Centre of Finland) research on surface plasmon resonance, Dr. Janusz Sadowski (now CEO of BioNavis)
- 2006 – BioNavis uses KSV Instruments Oy for distribution
- 2007 – Biolin Ab acquires KSV Instruments Oy
- 2010 – BioNavis partially dissolves the agreement with Biolin and centralizes its distribution network to its headquarters in Finland (about 40 distributors worldwide)
SPR instruments edit
The SPR instruments are mainly targeted to research of molecular interactions, and are used by researchers in physical chemistry, biochemistry, pharmaceutics, biotechnology, and medical diagnostics. SPR can be used to detect molecular interactions, such as protein-protein interactions, in terms of affinity and kinetics. Some examples of research questions that can be answered:
- What is the affinity and on- and off-rates for molecule X interacting with protein Y?
- How much protein Y does this serum sample contain? Can I quantify it without pre-cleaning?
- Can I measure quantitatively gas X from air samples?
- How does this polyelectrolyte multilayer grow? Is it linear or exponential growth? How thick are the layers?
- What are the optical properties of this layer?
- How does this surface/analyte interaction change when the electrical potential is changed?
- How does this electrochemical reaction proceed with different potentials/concentrations? What are the kinetics of the reaction?
- How does this surface coating react to different moisture contents in air?
- How much of molecule Y does this coating absorb? What about other coatings?
The flagship of BioNavis is SPR Navi 200, which has been developed in collaboration with Dr. Janusz Sadowski who has been the main driver in the research of SPR technique at VTT for over 20 years, and Dr. Ulf Jönsson, the founder and former CEO of Biacore, the company that pioneered the use of SPR spectroscopy for protein interaction analysis. BioNavis holds several international patents related to the SPR techniques and its applications.