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Now, a lab-on-chip technology for cheap, portable medical tests

Canadian researchers have created a portable device, which may be as useful in conducting medical tests as a lab full of expensive equipment.

Washington, January 30 : Canadian researchers have created a portable device, which may be as useful in conducting medical tests as a lab full of expensive equipment.

The shoebox-sized unit developed by the University of Alberta team, along with other small units that the researchers are in the process of making, may pave the way for enormous savings to health-care systems, and improve care for patients.

It is hoped that this invention will make for cheaper, faster, and easily accessible genetic tests.

Described in the scientific journal The Analyst, the reusable microchip-based system that costs just 500 pounds to build has earned the university team international recognition.

Christopher Backhouse, a professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, compares the development of such lab-on-chip 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.

According to him, miniaturization made that possible and brought the cost factor down by about a million.

"In health care we need that even more. Life science technologies exist but they are not being utilized because they are very expensive. We've applied the same miniaturization technologies to health care that were applied to computers by coming up with portable, lab-on-a-chip technologies that are easy to use," Backhouse says.

The highly integrated "chip" used in the system looks like a standard microscope slide etched with fine silver and gold lines. It applies nano-biotechnologies within tiny volumes, sometimes working with only a few molecules of sample. It is due to this chip only that the remainder of the system is inexpensive and fast.

Backhouse believes that the novel system may provide cancer patients with quick genetic tests, and, in turn, help pinpoint the type of cancer and personalise treatments.

It may also be useful in looking for the genetic signature for a virus or E. coli and testing water quality, he adds.

"From a public health point of view, it would be wonderful during an epidemic to be able to do a quick test on a patient when they walk into an emergency room and be able to say, 'you have SARS, you need to go into that (isolation) room immediately,'" says Backhouse.

Besides, a family doctor may determine a person's genetic predisposition to an illness during an office visit, and advise the patient on preventative lifestyle changes, says the researcher.

ANI