Bio Diversity

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On a cold Chicago day in the late 1990s, physicist David Grier was fiddling around in his laboratory with a cheap piece of plastic and a laser. Grier and a graduate student named Eric Dufresne were trying to build a new kind of "optical trap" — a device that splits a laser beam and uses it to capture particles of a single substance. Multiple traps, used in tandem, could let the scientists play traffic cop on a molecular level, separating a substance into component parts — removing bacteria from blood, for example. But first they had to make it work. For a year, Grier and Dufresne had been trying out fancy glass splitters, but nothing had done the trick. On this day (to help protect his patent, Grier won't say exactly when it was), they tried a $5 piece of plastic as a joke. "It should not have worked," Grier says. Yet it did — where earlier optical traps could capture a maximum of two substances, this cheap plastic one split the laser beam into 16 parts which, when properly harnessed, gave them the potential to trap 16 separate substances. It was the breakthrough they had been after for years. "We were stunned,'' Grier recalls.

Soon after that jaw-dropping development, Grier co-founded Arryx. With a product called BioRyx, Arryx has now perfected the laser-beam splitting technique into what it calls a set of "optical tweezers." But we prefer the traffic-cop analogy: picture a busy time-lapse video of crisscrossing highways, bridges and underpasses, and you get an idea of what matter looks like in a BioRyx under a microscope. BioRyx picks up different substances and tells them where to go. The technology today is used for everything from analyzing blood to separating the sperm cells in bull semen that produce bulls from those that make cows (which might not seem important unless you're a dairy farmer who needs a supply of milk- and cheese-producing females).

Arryx is one of 29 Technology Pioneers chosen this year by the World Economic Forum, the nonprofit organization of global political and business leaders best known for its annual meeting in Davos, Switzerland. Selected from among 114 nominees by a panel of technology experts, the Pioneers' biotech developments augur advances that will help people live longer, healthier, more productive lives. Pioneers like Arryx; Astex, a biotech firm in Cambridge, England; Raven Biotechnologies and Xencor, both in California; and Memory Pharmaceuticals of Montvale, New Jersey, are targeting cancer, Alzheimer's, nutrition, animal husbandry — you name it. Their innovations are a testimony to the do-it-yourself spirit that fuels both technology and entrepreneurship. Indeed, many of this year's Pioneers had to leave comfortable corporate or academic jobs in order to solve problems that have confounded others for years. "You could hear the people at Caltech snicker,'' says Xencor co-founder Bassil Dahiyat, recalling his graduate days at California Institute of Technology when he proposed that since protein shapes vary according to their functions, one could create new disease-fighting proteins by first imagining their shape. Looks like he may be right — Dahiyat now says

He is a year away from marketing protein-based drugs to treat arthritis and multiple sclerosis. For the luckier Pioneers like Grier and Dufresne, the distance between the initial "Eureka!" moment and a marketable business can be breathtakingly brief. It's true that they were not the first to develop an optical trap. This has been a hot area of scientific inquiry at least since 1986, when Bell Labs invented one. (Grier had done a postdoctoral fellowship at Bell Labs.) Back then, Bell Labs scientists invented a single-beam "optical tweezers" that trapped just one substance. That was a monumental breakthrough, but scientists began to ponder traps that could catch multiple substances and move them from one point to another. Since their plastic fantastic moment gave Grier and Dufresne 16 separate optical traps, that was enough for the University of Chicago to eventually showcase the duo to Lewis Gruber, a biotech entrepreneur and patent lawyer. Within months, he had invested in the technology, and Arryx was born, with Gruber as chief executive. Grier today is its chief scientific adviser, and a professor at New York University.