Anchored in technology developed at California Institute of Technology, ePetri, Inc. was structured around development of the new product designated "ePetri dish": a small, lens-free microscopy imaging platform. The prototype was built using a smartphone, a commercially available cell-phone image sensor and Lego building blocks. To use the platform, the culture is placed on an image sensor chip with the phoneâs LED screen functions as a scanning light source. The ePetri device was then placed in an incubator, with the image sensor chip connected to a laptop outside the incubator through a cable. The image-sensor would take pictures of the culture with the data sent to the laptop - effectively enabling monitroing of the cultures as they grew - a particularly useful in the imaging of cells growing very close to one another. In effect, instead of a large, heavy instrument, Users woud have a lightweight microscope providing high-quality images of cells, able to monitor the entire field, but also zoom in on areas of interest within the culture. With potential application in drug screening and detection of toxic compounds, the potential existed to provide microscopy-imaging capabilities for other portable diagnostic lab-on-a-chip tools. In fact, the principal of the firm moved on and now with JP
