Chad Mirkin, Materials-Focused Nanotechnology Solutions
Three decades of innovative research by chemist and nanoscientist Chad Mirkin are driving revolutionary advances in medicine, advanced manufacturing, and clean energy that are positively impacting society by leading to new ways to detect and treat disease, construct high-value products, and enable commercially viable decarbonization strategies.
Spherical nucleic acids (SNAs) – new nanoscale globular forms of DNA and RNA – make up a new class of drugs. This novel 3D architecture was invented and synthesized first by Mirkin in 1996, and his company Flashpoint Therapeutics, founded in 2022, is rapidly developing SNAs in the context of cancer immunotherapy. “SNAs underpin rational vaccinology, a structure-based approach to creating the most potent immunotherapies,” Mirkin said. “SNA vaccines are highly effective and have been used to cure certain forms of cancer in humans.”
High-area rapid printing (HARP) – an innovative, high-throughput manufacturing process invented and developed by Mirkin in 2019 – forms the basis of Azul 3D. Azul 3D has developed a suite of 3D printers driven by HARP. HARP takes ideas from prototyping to manufacturing in a streamlined, low-cost manner and can be used to print large objects at unparalleled speeds from a wide range of consumer and industrial-grade plastics. Major partnerships that rely on Azul’s 3D printers have been established with DuPont and Wilson so far.
In 2015, Mirkin co-founded TERA-print, and in 2020, he co-founded Mattiq. TERA-print is commercializing novel instrumentation for performing high-throughput, desktop-based nanolithography processes. Its instruments are used to make megalibraries, and megalibrary technology is the bedrock of Mattiq. These high-density arrays of gradients of millions to billions of nanostructures are being used to rapidly design, synthesize, screen, and identify new nanoarchitectures with almost any desired chemical or physical property. Mattiq is using the technology to identify electrocatalysts important to the clean energy industry. In addition, the unprecedentedly large data sets uniquely accessibly through megalibraries are enabling the world’s most powerful machine learning and AI for materials discovery purposes.
Mirkin, the George B. Rathmann Professor of Chemistry and Director of the International Institute for Nanotechnology, is known worldwide for his contributions to fundamental science as well as translation and entrepreneurship.