The market opportunities for new products and solutions that are Powered by Cardea are almost infinite, but a few examples could be; A farmer getting real time DNA insight to what fungi that is attacking his crops so he can treat the field while also not over killing it with fungicides and pesticides – and that is just one of many “precision medicine” use case examples that will benefit both crops, animals and humans due to BPUs based products in the hands of farmers, vets, researchers and doctors.

How is that even possible, you might ask? In the farmer example the specific BPU™ is called CRISPR-chip™ and is doing something called “Amplification-free DNA detection” which means DNA testing without the need for a sequencing lab. By adding CRISPR in to a BPU™ to utilize it as a genome search engine, Cardea created a BPU™ version called CRISPR-chip™ that ended up earning Cardea a cover story of the prestigious Nature Biomedical Engineering Journal as the first ever Amplification-free DNA detection solution.

As the CRISPR-chip™ that way is able to live observe CRISPR at work the farmer or doctor can that way get to know in near real-time if e.g. a plant or patient has a specific gene with a specific mutation resulting in a disease or as a solution to the problem, without the need for slow and expensive sequencing.

The newest version of the CRISPR-chip has even achieved a biosignal resolution so precise, that we can now read a single letter change in a human genome – a so called SNP (Single Nucleotide Polymorphism). This will allow for very valuable handheld biosignals and insights, otherwise impossible to measure today.

Biological signals happen in pico-seconds - a millionth of a millionth second. A blink of an eye is very slow in this context. To build a BPU™ that can process these signals in near real-time, you need a material that can transmit signals tremendously fast. Silicon, the semiconductor material used for CPUs, is way too slow for this purpose. Instead, we have successfully learned how to master the nanomaterial graphene to a degree where we have 20 patents on it now and Cardea is the only company able to mass produce BPU™ chips.

Graphene is a one-atom thick nanomaterial that is both metal and crystal at the same time, and it moves electricity between 100 and 1000 times faster than silicon, making it a near perfect semiconductor. In addition, graphene is biocompatible, making it a perfect substrate to attach molecular elements to in order to create the selective gateway between the digital networks and the biological networks.

Cardea’s BPUs can be configured and integrated at scale into thousands of products and applications that will be used in many different markets - in the field, at the bedside, or at the research bench - and that way enabling solutions once only dreamed of.

The core of BPU™ technology consists of multiple Cardean Transistors™ - that are graphene-based biology-gated field-effect transistors – that gets incorporated small particles of functioning multi-omics biological materials on to it like fx. DNA, RNA, and proteins.

At its core the BPU™ measure molecular binding interactions, that are arguably the common denominator for all biosignal types. That way the BPU™ platform allows for everything from simple measurements like antibody/antigen or DNA test all the way up to advanced multi-omics biosignals like (CRISPR) enzymes, active smell-receptor proteins and measurements like RNA-binding proteins that otherwise has been considered practically impossible.

Cardea’s BPU™ platform consists of BPUs, hardware, software and wetware. A BPU is configured for a specific application via wetware functionalization such as CRISPR or an antibody/antigen test. The functionalized BPU is then feeding biosignal over to the Gateway Reader, that obtains and distributes the data signal output to the software, the Gateway Analyzer, which in turn is connected to a computer or the cloud where Cardea’s bioinformatics and proprietary software are running. This combined architecture is Cardea’s BPU™ Platform.