Tech startup of the month: Metafluidics Inc., golden www.metafluidics.com founded: June 2003.

• Author: Peterson, Eric

INITIAL LIGHTBULB: "We've got all the catchwords going for us--nano, bio, tech," joked John Oakey, Metafluidics president and CEO.

As part of his dissertation for a chemical engineering Ph.D. at Colorado School of Mines, Oakey built the world's smallest mechanical pump out of colloids--very fine particles in a state between dissolving in a solution and being suspended in it. While Oakey's original intent was not medically related, he saw an opportunity for commercialization in that arena: Microfluidic networks are an emerging technology in sample analysis and biomedical research, but one that is not yet mature.

"We wanted to make pumps and valves on length scales far smaller than anyone else," said Oakey. "The width of a human hair is what we consider to be a very large pipe. A single micron would be the smallest." The project was a success, and the results were published in Science magazine in 2003.

After completing his Ph.D. last May, Oakey enlisted David Marr, his research adviser at Mines, as CTO and launched the company. Both are also currently on the faculty at Mines.

IN A NUTSHELL: Today, biological sample analysis is typically done in room-sized cell sorters at centralized labs. While R&D is ongoing, Metafluidics is aiming to use its microscopic pumps and valves as the guts of a microfluidic network to sort and analyze small samples of cells. The ultimate Metafluidics mission is to shrink down cell sorters to a portable size (and cheaper price) that would fit at the side of a bed in a hospital room--or anywhere else.

"We've developed the fluidic tools on the micro-scale and the analytical tools to create these kind of devices," explained Oakey. "Our focus application ... is to take suspensions of individual cells and analyze them, investigate them, and sort them on whatever metric you want. It's really a research tool."

"They (researchers) are focused typically on larger samples, many thousands of cells," added Marr. "We're focused on minute samples."

Oakey...