By What do you think about when you picture a medical laboratory? Probably a room (or an entire building) filled with strange equipment, chemicals with funny names and more people in white coats than you’d like to see all your life. But what do you do as a physician when you’re out in the field, or far away from a laboratory and need to perform a critical analysis? A lab-on-a chip. It’s pretty new technology, but it’s starting to appear in the news more and more often. Basically they’re devices capable of performing one or more laboratory functions and they’re all integrated into an approximately credit-card sized chip.
One of the most promising uses of this technology has been in detection of diseases, and the EU-funded chip called MicroActive is one of the best examples. SINTEF, its developers, claim that it can check for various bacterial and viral diseases, but most importantly, for cancer. Researchers Liv Furuberg and Michal Mielnik said “This little chip is capable of carrying out the same processes as a large laboratory, and not only does it perform them faster, but the results are also far more accurate,”. “The doctor simply inserts the card into a little machine, adds a few drops of the sample taken from the patient via a tube in the cardholder, and out come the results” the researchers added.
The chip itself is engraved with some very narrow channels, containing the necessary proportion of enzymes and chemicals for analysis, which are mixed as soon as a patient’s sample is injected into the channels. It works by analyzing blood or tissue samples for the presence or absence of certain biomarkers, which are usually proteins, DNA fragments or enzymes. Once these are found, they can be read in a spectrophotometer, an instrument in which specific RNA molecules give off specific fluorescent signals. SINTEF aren’t resting on their laurels, however – they’re already working on several types of different chips, including a protein analysis chip for acute inflammations.