David Brown is a man who hopes to do big things by thinking small.

Brown, a former Texas-based cellular researcher, is a co-founder of MicroJek, a five-year-old Kansas City company that produces the world’s smallest commercially available micro-injection needles.

How small? The company is operating in nanotechnology territory, with its finest needle having an outside diameter of 0.2 microns. You’d have to bundle as many as 500 of them together to produce the diameter of a human hair, generally calculated at 100 microns wide. MicroJek’s finest is approximately two-thirds smaller than the smallest needles available from the industry leader.

“The products allow researchers to operate in a physical plane they were not able to before,” Brown said. Micro-injection techniques had been in place since the late 1970s, but not the tools needed to perfect them.

The technology allows scientific researchers to inject pieces of DNA, RNA or fluorescent dyes into single-cell organisms with much greater accuracy and success. A single animal cell, after all, reacts much as its host organism will if you punch too large a hole in it—it dies.

“If you can keep the cell alive, microinjection is the most viable method by which scientists can introduce a macromolecule into individual cells,” Brown said. And working with individual cells allows researchers to determine what minor changes are taking place at the cellular level, whether they are metabolic or structural. “The results reveal more accurately what is occurring in living organisms because the experiments are performed using the living cell as the researcher’s test-tube,” he said.

Brown developed the technology needed to produce the ultra-fine needles years ago, while still working as a researcher in Galveston. His process yields a glass tube, rather than the metallic composition of, say, a hypodermic—the image most of us have when we think of needles used in medical applications.

They were originally produced for a company he co-owned, created to research cures into sickle-cell anemia and beta thalassemia. But that company, Gene-Cell, literally fell on Sept. 11, 2001; its main European investor support was withdrawn almost before the dust cloud had settled from the World Trade Center. Foreign investors, Brown said, were not sure that research institutions in the U.S. could recover swiftly enough from the terrorist attack and to generate the necessary breakthroughs in biomedical research. Brown retained ownership of his process, though, and brought it to the Kansas City area through his ties with other founding partners of MicroJek. Originally manufactured here, the needles are now produced in Fort Lauderdale, Fla., home to another partner that MicroJek has engaged through its growth.

As the company’s output grows, the partners envision returning some of that production to Kansas City. Many of the needles’ research applications involve animal sciences, and an estimated 60 percent of the nation’s animal-health research is taking place within a 100-mile radius of the metropolitan area. That, and the regional efforts to elevate Kansas City as a biomedical, life-sciences, and animal-research center, make this area an ideal environment for the company’s long-term growth, Brown noted.

While the specific methods of production remain a closely held company secret, Brown is able to address the kinds of challenges that had to be overcome in producing such small needles. Some are grounded in composition; others in process. For one, needles that fine can lose their sharpness by simply not being properly packaged and stored after coming off the line. Flow control, tapering and malleability were also hurdles that had to be conquered.

For now, though, it appears that MicroJek has defined the frontier for how small needles can go—at least with applications in molecular biology.