Biochips pack the equivalent of thousands of micro-test tubes on a single glass slide.
Motorola, Inc. and Packard Instrument Company have formed a joint research partnership with Argonne National Laboratory to commercialize and market biochip and related analytical technologies, based on inventions by Argonne and Russia's Engelhardt Institute of Molecular Biology. Commercialization of the technology is expected to make decoding genes a thousand times faster and to lead to rapid advances in drug discovery, health care and agriculture. The project, which aims at commercializing and marketing advanced biochips and related analytical technologies, is expected to make the process of decoding genes, human or otherwise, a thousand times faster than with current technologies. Motorola will develop manufacturing processes to mass produce biochips,and Packard will develop and manufacture the analytical instruments to process and analyze the biochips. Argonne's contribution, in conjunction with its Moscow research partner the Russian Academy of Science's Engelhardt Institute of Molecular Biology, is intellectual property in the form of 19 inventions related to biological microchips.