July 24, 2002
Arryx' BioRyx® 200 System Wins R&D 100 Award
Arryx, Inc. announced today that its BioRyx® 200 system has been
chosen as an R&D 100 Award winner for 2002. The award, sponsored
by R&D Magazine, recognizes "the 100 most technologically significant
products of the year." Past winners have included many products
that have since become household names, including Polaroid color
film, the fax machine, liquid crystal displays, the automated teller
machine, and HDTV.
Like these past winners, the BioRyx® 200 system incorporates breakthrough
technology. Using Arryx's proprietary holographic optical trapping
technology, the BioRyx® 200 system can grab and move up to 200 microscopic
objects at one time. It is expected to immediately enable ground-breaking
research and development in health fields, as well as advances in
optical communications and optical processing of information.
In concept, the BioRyx® 200 system performs in the same fashion
as the futuristic "tractor beam" of the "Star Trek" television show,
by moving objects with beams of light. However, unlike the television
device, the BioRyx® 200 system is a real system for grabbing, moving,
spinning, assembling, and otherwise controlling particles in a range
that spans from 1/1000th the diameter of a human hair up to the
size of a human cell. A single BioRyx ™ 200 system can perform applications
that currently require a variety of different apparatus such as
biochips, labs-on-chips, cell sorters, micromanipulators and systems
for purification and separation.
"The BioRyx® 200 system opens the floodgates in terms of making
the benefits of nanotechnology available to create new products,"
said Lewis Gruber, co-founder and CEO of Arryx, Inc. "We are very
pleased to have R&D Magazine select our first product for this
award, a product developed in the first year of our existence."
Arryx recently sold a BioRyx® 200 system to the University of Maryland.
University researchers intend to apply their BioRyx® 200 system
in fields ranging from biology to physics to geology. "Having the
BioRyx® 200 system here at the University enables us to pursue exciting
new questions across broad areas of research," said Wolfgang Losert,
Assistant Professor of Physics at the University.
