Lab on a chip developed at University of Alberta for cheap, portable medical tests
University of Alberta researchers in Edmonton, Canada, have developed a portable unit for genetic testing about the size of a shoebox, which has the same capability as a lab full of expensive equipment. The device - along with other, even smaller units the team is now in the process of developing - paves the way for enormous savings to health-care systems and will improve care for patients. A wide variety of genetic tests that are available but not often used because their cost is prohibitive will become cheap, fast and easily accessible.
Prof. Christopher Backhouse, of the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, together with Dr. Linda Pilarski, an oncology professor in the Faculty of Medicine and Dentistry, and their research team, have received international recognition for the device. An article describing their "shoebox-sized" portable unit appears in The Analyst.
Backhouse compares the development of these technologies to the development of computers: "In the early days of computers, they were inaccessible - million-dollar beasts that filled a room and you needed a PhD to be able to operate one. Nowadays, everybody has one and they're even in kindergarten classes," he says. He says miniaturization made that possible and brought the cost factor down by about a million.
The engineering team has been building and testing the units in the University of Alberta's Micro and Nano Fabrication Facility (commonly called the NanoFab), an open-access lab used by U of A researchers, and scientists from other universities and high-tech companies.
"We can work on a drop of almost anything," Backhouse says of their diagnostic unit. It takes about an hour to get the results. The heart of the unit, the 'chip,' looks like a standard microscope slide etched with fine silver and gold lines. That microfabricated chip applies nano-biotechnologies within tiny volumes, sometimes working with only a few molecules of sample. Because of this highly integrated chip (containing microfluidics and microscale devices), the remainder of the system is inexpensive ($1,000) and fast.
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