New Fiberoptic Solutions Accelerate Drug Discovery

Life science studies require researchers to answer hundreds, sometimes thousands, of questions at a time. Researchers accomplish this by reducing sample sizes and using high-speed, massively parallel analytical techniques. However, these techniques often decrease the quality of the data. INCOM offers several new solutions to labware and analytical equipment manufacturers that improve data quality in high-speed techniques.

Answering a Thousand Questions at a Time

INCOM's FiberOptical™ Microwell Arrays provide over 400,000 analytical sites on a standard microscope slide. By contrast, the next most advanced microplates have 1536 wells. INCOM’s microwell arrays can therefore lead researchers into a new era of productivity and lower costs. This combined with fiberoptic interrogation of each well literally enables researchers to answer a thousand questions at a time.

Faceplates Increase the Efficiency AND Integrity of High Speed Analyses

The optical purity of INCOM’s fiberoptic faceplates used on microwell arrays, microplates, and microfluidic devices solves several problems associated with smaller sample sizes and increasing speeds. The fiberoptic bottom plates present millions of noise-free, distortion-free images on exactly the same plane to inverted microscopes, bottom readers, and CCDs. This form of direct contact imaging eliminates focusing and increases sensitivity, spatial resolution, and well-to-well consistency to ensure precise, valid results.

Only FiberOptical microarray plates can provide this level of performance. These plates transfer the image from the well bottom to the surface. By using millions of optically-isolated individual fibers to transfer the image, crosstalk is eliminated and resolution increases significantly. In contrast, glass and polystyrene arrays require microscopes to focus through the thickness of an amorphous bottom plate with its inherent chromatic aberrations to capture the image in the well.

INCOM’s life science products enable scientists to complete the following research objectives faster, at lower cost, and with greater confidence in the results: Fluorescent and luminescent reactions, including genomic and proteomic analyses; cell and crystal growth; cell counting; and spectroscopic type analyses.

Incom fiberoptic technology
could have shortened the time
to map the human genome
from years to months.