Ten years ago, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill scientist Anne Taylor, Ph.D., then a bioengineering graduate student at the University of California at Irvine, wanted to make a contribution to neuroscience from an engineering standpoint.

So she invented a device that her husband, attorney Brad Taylor, calls “an artificial brain on a chip.”

That evolved into a company: XONA Microfluidics. XONA moved its two-person R&D operations to North Carolina when Anne Taylor accepted a position as assistant professor of bioengineering at UNC in 2010.

Anne Taylor invented the device in the laboratory of Noo Li Jeon, Ph.D., who is now in Seoul, South Korea. It’s made from a silicone compound called polydimethylsiloxane (PDMS). An inch square, it has two tiny chambers connected by microgrooves.

Carl Cotman, professor of neuroscience at UC-Irvine, and a world-renowned expert in the field, helped guide Anne Taylor’s research. Anne Taylor, Jeon, and Cotman are all credited as co-inventors.

Neurons are placed in the chambers. They grow and shoot out axons, the appendage that transmits signals away from the neurons. The microgrooves are just large enough to fit the axon. That isolates them for study.

In the lab, Brad Taylor explained in an interview with the Biotech Center, “the axons tend to form large clumps.” A previous method of studying them was “clunky, took a lot of preparation time, and wasn’t a very useful tool.”

XONA’s device, on the other hand, provides a new window of observation for scientists studying Alzheimer’s and other neurological diseases and processes.

UC-Irvine lab technician Joseph Harris, now a XONA company manager, tested the utility of the device and found there was a demand for it. So the Taylors and Harris held their first business meeting at a Starbucks and formed XONA (the letters of axon scrambled).

An early seed-capital deal with Merck’s Millipore, which sells chemicals for applications in labs and industry, from biosciences to cosmetics, helped launch the startup with a sales-distribution deal in 2008. “They have a great distribution network,” Brad Taylor said.

In North Carolina, the company applied for a Phase 1 Small Business Technology Transfer Grant from the National Institute of Mental Health in 2011 and was awarded $678,765. Then, in April 2016, it won a Phase 2 grant of more than $1.95 million to continue its R&D.

The company also found the North Carolina life science talent pool attractive. “Great talent comes out of UNC, Duke, and North Carolina State University. We were able to interview a lot of people. We appreciated the talent pool,” said Brad Taylor.

He admits keeping a startup company going is “challenging.” The company is debt-free and currently has no outside investors, though the founders would consider investors if the deal were right.

“We need to do more marketing. So far it’s basically been word-of-mouth. So we would entertain outside funding.”

The R&D required to diversify XONA’s product line and make it even more useful to neuroscientists is also expensive, he added.

The company is “very hopeful it will soon be able to automate” the labor-intensive process of manufacturing the devices, he said.

The original device sold for $150 for a five-pack. More than 300 institutions globally purchased it. In November 2017 it received a European patent on the device, which is already patented in the United States. It now offers a range of products based on the device.

Brad Taylor is confident that XONA is ready to roll.

“We own this space,” he says.