Technology

In 2000 the Nobel Prize in Chemistry was awarded for the discovery of a unique class of conducting polymer materials which are revolutionizing the electronic and display industries and are the foundation of Sirigen’s technology.

The patented chemistries allow the creation of specifically tailored polymers which can serve as “molecular antennae”, collecting and transferring increased energy to standard fluorescent labels bound to nucleic acid probes and antibodies.

Implementing these materials into conventional molecular testing dramatically intensifies resulting detection signals by up to 100 times, offering sensitivity orders of magnitude beyond the physical limitations of existing methods and reagents.

Nucleic acid assays

Immunology assays

Sirigen’s “market disruptive objective” is to deploy its Conjugated Polymer (CG) technology to improve the sensitivity of diagnostic testing platforms through assay improvement, thus driving:

  • Conversion away from chemiluminescence to fluorescence as a measuring principle to provide automated laboratory protocols for screening purposes.
  • The simplification and miniaturization of instrumentation
  • The relocation of appropriate diagnostic test from the lab to near the patient
  • Diagnostics which are portable, stable, affordable and accessible globally

Signal Amplification

The polymer chains can be considered as a collection of optical segments (defined as the number of polymer repeat units over which an exciton is delocalized).  Each segment in the polymer is capable of absorbing light, resulting in materials that can have extremely large extinction coefficients (or probability of absorbing photons of light).

As a result of the electronic delocalization inherent to these materials, energy has the ability to move or migrate along these extended chains. Thus all the light “harvested” by the polymers can be channelled to a closely associated fluorescent acceptor of lower energy. It is this collective, “molecular antenna” like behaviour that forms the foundation of the Sirigen technology and intellectual property base. This central concept is depicted below: