> Ronny van 't Oever, New business development, sales and marketing

Ronny van 't Oever studied applied physics at the University of Twente in Enschede, the Netherlands. He finished his study in 1999, during his study he specialised in MEMS. He realized a micro pipette in a flow cell for DNA analysis with micromachining. He has been involved in a flow cytometry project at Abbott Diagnostics where he invented a now patented way to analyse red blood cells. In 1999 he co-founded the company Micronit. In the early days he was in charge for technology and product development. Nowadays he is responsible for new business development, sales and marketing.

Can you briefly introduce Micronit to the readers?

Micronit Microfluidics develops lab-on-a-chip solutions for various applications in life sciences and chemistry. Our core business is the development and manufacture of glass based microfluidic devices, the key components for next-generation laboratory instrumentation. Our customers can be divided into two important groups. At one side, they are researchers at universities and research institutes, doing scientific research in microfluidics. The other group consists of industrial parties developing analytical instrumentation based on lab-on-a-chip. Micronit can be seen as a supplier to these OEM companies. Our customers are based all over the world, but mainly in Europe and the USA. Micronit was founded in 1999 by Micha Mulder and myself. It is a well-growing business with 30 employees, and own cleanroom equipment where we develop prototypes and manufacture devices in high volumes.

 

What is according to you the main advantage of using glass for microfluidic chips?

There are many advantages of using glass for microfluidic chips, but three of them are key: 1. Glass has superior optical properties compared to other materials. 2. Glass has an excellent shelf life; the material properties will not change when the chips are held in stock. 3. Manufacturing technologies for high volume are mature allowing the right price in high volume manufacturing. Especially for applications such as capillary electrophoresis, glass is considered the best material to work with, because of its optical quality and chemical stability.

 

What are the main trends you see in this business?

The focus in the market has changed from how to make microfluidic devices into content generation for microfluidics. More and more laboratory analyses are now done with lab-on-a-chip based instrumentation. Many university spin-offs develop specific devices or methods for very specific product-market combinations (PMC’s). Micronit has the product development skills to help those companies to develop their microfluidic product and decrease their time to market.

 

In a medium term, what will be the next key steps for your company?

As the number of product-market combinations that can benefit from our product portfolio increases, we feel the need for diversification in certain ways to enable new business development focusing on specific markets. Together with partner companies, we are developing new products, for instance for capillary electrophoresis applications or for chemistry. Another tendency we see in our business is the standardization of microfluidic components for research applications. We just launched our new Fluidic Connect platform, which enables researchers to quickly create their lab-on-a-chip set-up. This reduces the time for them to publish scientific results on microfluidics. In the very near future, we expect to launch more standard lab-on-a-chip products.