Altrika Ltd uses a range of printing techniques to create microarrays of different materials for subsequent characterisation and screening. These can create vast libraries of materials on a single substrate (such as a glass microscope slide) and enable them to be interrogated for their properties in a highly parallel manner .Two specific techniques are used:
Contact printing
This technique is used for materials that can be dissolved. Materials in solution can quickly be arrayed in a highly repeatable manner on a range of substrates using contact-printing technology. This can be used for any pre-synthesised library of materials including Altrika Ltd's in-house library of well-characterised biomedical materials, a library of materials from our collaborators or third-party material libraries.
Inkjet printing
Ilika Plc's inkjet system works in a similar way to a conventional inkjet printer that is commonly used to print documents. The inkjet printer has four base colours (sources), and blends them as required to create more than 10,000 colours. In a similar way, Ilika Plc's inkjet system takes up to 96 polymers and monomers (sources) which can create millions of different polymers. Ilika Plc typically prints a large number (typically 2000) of small spots of polymers (100-400 microns) onto glass slides (25mm x 75mm) or microarrays, which can then be subjected to characterisation. Ilika Plc utilises this system in three different ways:
- Inkjet Printing: re-printing of Altrika’s proprietary polymers or another pre-synthesised library
- Inkjet Blending: blending of (up to 96) polymers to create novel polymer mixtures. This is of particular interest in highly-regulated area,s as it allows new polymers to be established which comprise only well-characterised components
- Inkjet Synthesis: blending of (up to 96) monomers and polymerisation of the mixture during the arraying process.
