SELDI technology was developed by T. William Hutchens and Tai-Tung Yip at Baylor College of Medicine in 1993. Hutchens and Yip attached single-stranded DNA to agarose beads and used the beads to capture lactoferrin, an iron-binding glycoprotein, from preterm infant urine. The beads were incubated in the sample and then removed, washed, and analyzed with a MALDI-MS probe tip. This research led to the idea that MALDI surfaces could be derivatized with SEAC devices; the technique was later described by Hutchens and Yip in 1998.
SELDI technology was first commercialized by Ciphergen Biosystems in 1997 as the ProteinChip system, and is now produced and marketed by Bio-Rad Laboratories.