HexagonFab cracks nanomanufacturing for pocket diagnostics
HexagonFab’s founders say their graphene-based sensors are set to become the lab tests that don’t need a physical lab
Detecting minute amounts of biomolecules is important in many applications, such as in medical diagnostics – where the presence of a certain protein indicates a disease – or in industrial monitoring – where contaminants can have severe consequences for the product. These cases require fast and sensitive methods of detection. Current methods offer either speed and ease of use, such as lateral flow tests; or high sensitivity, such as laboratory-based ELISA tests. This trade-off between speed and ease of use and sensitivity is not efficient enough in some use-cases, for example, when performing medical diagnostics in a remote location.
HexagonFab has combined these needs by developing a new generation of sensors that offer high sensitivity without compromising on speed. The sensors rely on a graphene-based nanomaterial that is the result of several years of intense research by co-founder Ruizhi Wang in Stephan Hofmann’s group at the University of Cambridge.