Objectives

The increase in average age of Europeans in the next decades will steadily increase. This means that a strongly increased number of old-age related diseases will occur, like brain and heart malfunctioning and/or neurological diseases. Hence, there will be a huge pressure to develop cheap and effective drugs for these diseases. The BioDrop flagship is intended to provide the required knowledge to European companies and academia to solve this problem via a software-controllable digital microfluidic platform.

The use of microelectronic fluidics for biomedical applications has many advantages in comparison to a macro approach like currently in peptide synthesis. It offers scalability, low cost, high quality and is much more flexible. European industry is lagging seriously behind in this area as compared to the US. BioDrop aims to develop knowledge which is broadly useable by European companies and provide this knowledge and services via its virtual laboratory. The mix of industries, universities and institutes each fill particular parts in this goal. The project covers new technology, its required simulation environment, system development in terms of hardware and software, biochemical issues, as well as expected markets.

The BioDrop project is likely to generate IPs in technology, design methodologies, software and test approaches. All existing IPs from non-PATENT companies remain their own property.  Newly developed IPs from non-PATENT companies in BioDrop remains their own. IPs developed in BioDrop from the institutes and universities is fully available as knowledge. Commercial use of these IPRs via PATENT is fully available, but financial profit is proportional to PATENT and their own contribution.