In June 2006 Biacore was sold for $390 million and became a product brand under GE Healthcare life Sciences, which became Cytiva in April 2020.
The technology is based on surface plasmon resonance (SPR), an optical phenomenon that enables detection of unlabeled interactants in real time.
The SPR-based biosensors can be used in determination of active concentration as well as characterization of molecular interactions in terms of both affinity and chemical kinetics.
Changes in the index of refraction at the surface where the binding interaction occurs are detected by the hardware and recorded as RU (resonance units) in the control software.
Curves are generated from the RU trace and are evaluated by fitting algorithms which compare the raw data to well-defined binding models.