KOPA

Period: 3.2019 – 12.2020

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Prof. Dr. Felix Hausch | FB 7, Organische Chemie und Biochemie

Prof. Dr.-Ing. Klaus Hofmann | FB 18, Elektro- und Informationstechnik

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Project description:

The identification of novel chemical and pharmaceutical ingredients requires the synthesis and testing of a large number of substances. Using combinational chemistry, a large library of chemical ingredients can be designed, but requires effective coding mechanisms. In our approach we intended to use an electronic/photonic ASIC with integrated nonvolatile memory, in which the reaction history of substances is coded. The usage of this massively miniaturized ASIC can only be done wirelessly with integrated photodiodes. A critical step has been the deposition of bioactive substances to the ASICs surface. Numerous different activation methods for silicon surfaces have been investigated. The originally planned quantification of substances or functionalized linkers as precursors of the latter by fluorescence microscopy turned out to be not practical due to the high background. Therefore, several alternative detection methods for the characterization of the silica surface were evaluated.

Combinational chemistry is a powerful hit generation tool in drug discovery. In particular DNA-encoded chemistry as the latest technological development in this field has generated considerable traction.9-11 Although the potential of this method is enormous, its current scope is limited by the lack of an encoding system for the executed synthetic sequences that is compatible with a broad range of reaction conditions typically employed in drug synthesis.

In our approach we are using a combined electronic/photonic integrated circuit (IC) with nonvolatile memory cells (NVM). Power and data for this IC are received by integrated photo diodes, whereby the encoding data is written to the NVM. This IC has to be extremely small below 1mm3 chip volume to be economically feasible, which contradicts to the requirement of performant photo diodes. These Photoencodable Particles will receive a coating that protects the particle interior against various chemical conditions and provide defined anker groups for the combinatiorial chemistry. The contactless writing to the Photoencodable Particles has to be experimentally developed and proven under realistic conditions.