Digitizing Biology: The Roswell Molecular Electronics Platform for Biosensing - 9

EXPERT PANEL DISCUSSION
Digitizing Biology: The Roswell Molecular
Electronics Platform for Biosensing
Moderator: Fay Lin, PhD1
Participants: Adam Frost, MD, PhD,2 Carl Fuller, PhD,3 Laurent Galibert, PhD,4
Maryam Moarefian, PhD,5 and Jay Wohlgemuth, MD6
1Senior Editor, GEN Biotechnology, Mary Ann Liebert, Inc., New Rochelle, New York, USA.
2Associate Professor, Department ofBiochemistry and Biophysics, University ofCalifornia, San Francisco, San
Francisco, California, USA.
3Head ofRoswell Innovation Lab Roswell Biotechnologies Inc., San Diego, California, USA.
4Senior Expert Scientist, VIB, Leuven, Belgium.
5Postdoctoral Scholar, Keck Graduate Institute, Claremont, California, USA.
6Senior Vice President, R&D, Medical and Chief Medical Officer, Quest Diagnostics, Secaucus, New Jersey,
USA.
Introduction
Roswell Biotechnologies is a molecular electronics
company based in San Diego, CA, founded by Paul
Mola and Barry Merriman. Roswell's mission is to
transform health by developing new sensor-on-chip
technology to ''digitize biology,'' bringing the full
power ofsemiconductor chips to modernize diagnostic
testing and personal health monitoring.
On January 24, 2022, scientists at Roswell published
an article in the Proceedings of the National
Academy of Sciences (PNAS) unveiling their molecular
electronics chip. As a major technological
advance, Roswell highlights this chip is the first to
realize a 50-year-old technological goal of directly
integrating molecules into circuits as functional elements,
in this case as universal sensors. The chip is
capable of measuring real-time single-molecule interactions
in a high-throughput, high-resolution,
and multiplexed approach. The article demonstrates
sensor capabilities that can provide a powerful
new tool for fundamental biochemical research,
and which enable applications in areas such as
drug discovery, diagnostics, DNA sequencing, and
proteomics.
In this roundtable discussion, moderated by GEN
Biotechnology senior editor, Fay Lin, five experts in
biochemistry, molecular electronics, and drug develª
2022 Mary Ann Liebert, Inc.
opment evaluate the findings of the PNAS article,
discuss some immediate applications of the chip, and
predict what we can next expect from the Roswell
team's advanced technology.
(This roundtable transcript has been lightly edited
for length and clarity.)
Dr. Lin: Carl, as the first author of Roswell's PNAS
article, can you summarize the main highlights of
this technology? What can you do with this new
type of measurement?
Dr. Fuller: The article is about a biosensor that some of
the Roswell Biotechnologies team have been thinking
about for over 20 years and working on for over 6 years.
It is based on a fundamentally new type ofsensor, which
wires a single molecule into an electrical current meter
circuit and uses this current readout to electrically
monitor the molecules' interactions with other molecules.
I was lucky to start right at the time when this
''molecular electronics'' sensor was producing some
lovely data.
We started with a sensor working in a complicated
''physics experiment'' set-up that provided only eight
nanoelectrodes for wiring-in molecules. An important
part of the work presented in the article is that we have
now embodied these single-molecule sensors into a
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