Scientists develop 'lab on a chip' that costs 1 cent to make

Scientists develop 'lab on a chip' that costs 1 cent to make
 

Researchers have developed a way to produce a cheap and reusable diagnostic "lab on a chip" with the help of an ordinary inkjet printer.

At a production cost of as little as 1 cent per chip, the new technology could usher in a medical diagnostics revolution like the kind brought on by low-cost genome sequencing, said the senior author.

A study describing the technology will be published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

A combination of microfluidics, electronics and inkjet printing technology, the lab on a chip is a two-part system. The first is a clear silicone microfluidic chamber for housing cells and a reusable electronic strip. The second part is a regular inkjet printer that can be used to print the electronic strip onto a flexible sheet of polyester using commercially available conductive nanoparticle ink.

"We designed it to eliminate the need for clean-room facilities and trained personnel to fabricate such a device," said lead author. One chip can be produced in about 20 minutes.

Designed as a multifunctional platform, one of its applications is that it allows users to analyze different cell types without using fluorescent or magnetic labels that are typically required to track cells. Instead, the chip separates cells based on their intrinsic electrical properties: When an electric potential is applied across the inkjet-printed strip, cells loaded into the microfluidic chamber get pulled in different directions depending on their "polarizability" in a process called dielectrophoresis. This label-free method to analyze cells greatly improves precision and cuts lengthy labeling processes.

The tool is designed to handle small-volume samples for a variety of assays. The researchers showed the device can help capture single cells from a mix, isolate rare cells and count cells based on cell types. The cost of these multifunctional biochips is orders of magnitude lower than that of the individual technologies that perform each of those functions. A standalone flow cytometer machine, for example, which is used to sort and count cells, costs $100,000, without taking any operational costs into account.

The low cost of the chips could democratize diagnostics similar to how low-cost sequencing created a revolution in health care and personalized medicine, senior author said. Inexpensive sequencing technology allows clinicians to sequence tumor DNA to identify specific mutations and recommend personalized treatment plans. In the same way, the lab on a chip has the potential to diagnose cancer early by detecting tumor cells that circulate in the bloodstream. "The genome project has changed the way an awful lot of medicine is done, and we want to continue that with all sorts of other technology that are just really inexpensive and accessible," senior author said.

http://med.stanford.edu/news/all-news/2017/02/scientists-develop-lab-on-a-chip-that-costs-1-cent-to-make.html

http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2017/01/31/1621318114.abstract?sid=c0824bcc-d711-4daf-b2dd-8c707e68bfb6

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