Since the first commercial digital PCR (dPCR) platform was introduced in 2008, dPCR has been developed for more than a decade and has penetrated rapidly in life science research and applications. Including the prefabricated chip based and microdroplet based dPCR, numerous brands and products have emerged.
The competition between qPCR and dPCR is also being discussed heatedly. The mainstream view in the industry is that the position of qPCR is unshakeable in the foreseeable future and the two platform will co-exist in a long time. So it seems that dPCR exists only as a complement to qPCR by default. However, the Sniper company was founded with the goal of "replacing qPCR with dPCR" as the direction of the company's development.
Digital PCR has an overwhelming technical advantage over qPCR!
"The dPCR technology allows the sample to be partitioned into many thousands of individual micro PCR reactors, increasing the signal-to-noise ratio of the sample and greatly improving the sensitivity of the assay. "Said Guangji Sheng, Sniper president and CEO. "The number of partitions is equivalent to the level of improved signal-to-noise ratio, without the need to develop advanced biochemical systems to improve sensitivity and specificity. For example, if I split the sample into 10,000 parts, then for each small part, the signal-to-noise ratio is increased by a factor of 10,000! This is the core of digital PCR technology, which is equivalent to a significant increase in the sensitivity and specificity of the assay at low cost."
What exactly is the ideal digital PCR product?
The cumbersome workflow, complicated operation and expensive digital PCR instrument products have masked the advantages of digital PCR technology.
GuangJi Sheng believes that dPCR involves multidisciplinary integration and is difficult to make. “It is not difficult to make a product, but extremely difficult to make a good product. To make dPCR more popular, the prerequisite is that digital PCR products achieve a breakthrough!"
First of all, we need to solve the problem of "expensive" instrumentation. The current microfluidic droplet generation technology is the mainstream method. Microfluidic technology's refined operation, extremely low reagent consumption and high throughput have been expected to push the development of dPCR. However, microfluidic droplet generation still has many problems, especially, the microchannels production is complex and requires high process, making the overall cost still relatively high.
Sniper has invented a new method of droplet generation - vibratory injection technology. The principle is similar to a pipette tip, where a capillary tube is attached to the front end of the tip and then insert the capillary tube beneath the oil surface, oscillating it rapidly while expelling the aqueous liquid uniformly outward to form droplets. This distinctive droplet generation method can generate droplets with high volume accuracy and consistency as well as good batch-to-batch consistency. "This takes the cost of consumables, the most central issue in digital PCR, out of the equation." Sheng added, "After batch production, it was able to achieve cost control comparable to that of a regular pipette tip.”
The next step is to solve the problem of complicated dPCR workflow. Why are the mainstream digital PCR systems on the market consists of multiple instrument parts? The fundamental reason is that they use the microfluidic chip approach. However, each step of droplet generation, PCR amplification and fluorescence detection requests various consumables of various physical properties. It is difficult to integrate, so the microfluidic technology based dPCR needs to use different parts to carry out each operating steps.
However, the droplets generated by the vibratory injection technique fall by gravity to the bottom of the vessel, where PCR amplification is performed directly by heating at the bottom and detected by fluorescence photography above. "The digital PCR technology developed independently by Snafu is itself an integrated technology pathway, and droplets do not need to be back and forth between different instruments."
Sheng divides the company's development into three stages. The key goal of the first stage is to turn the technology into products and verify that the products can be produced. At present, SNF has mass-produced more than one hundred digital PCR systems and reached cooperation with many KOL users; The second stage is to use our digital PCR platform to prove the competitive advantage in various application scenarios. In this stage he will select key fields, such as infection diseases, tumor precision medicine and other territories, to develop highly sensitive quantitative detection kits portfolio; The third stage is IPO listing, through the power of capital mass promotion, with the platform technology advantage to establish a position in the market.
Welcome to visit our booth to learn more about Sniper DQ24 digital PCR system and Sniper vibratory injection droplet generation technology.