57FISH-on-chip technology has potential clinical applications for cost-effective
screening of cancer patients. The rapid detection of chromosomal mutations will
increase a physician’s ability to personalize treatment strategies to target indi-
vidual cancers.
Lab-on-a-Chip
A number of lab-on-a-chip devices have been constructed. An important limiting
factor has been the diffi culty of establishing molecular assays suitable for microfab-
ricated formats. The assays should be capable of monitoring a wide range of mole-
cules, including genomic DNA, RNA and proteins with secondary modifi cations
and interaction partners, and they must exhibit excellent sensitivity and specifi city
(Melin et al. 2008 ). Incorporation of new molecular tools may provide opportunities
for lab-on-a-chip devices at the POC.
The power of the lab-on-a-chip concept lies primarily in its ability to detect and
manipulate at the cellular and molecular level with suffi ciently high throughputs.
With careful design and scaling considerations, molecular and cellular detectors (or
biosensors) facilitated by controlled microfl uidic separation, purifi cation, sorting,
and mixing operations are more sensitive and specifi c. Three levels of detection
have been described (Lee 2009 ):
- For DNA detection, a droplet microfl uidic platform enables rapid and homoge-
nous mixing in confi ned picoliter volumes for molecular hybridization fl uores-
cence images - For proteins, an acoustic cavity mixer enables an order of magnitude increase in
speed of detection - A novel microfl uidic device based on dielectrophoresis enables the detection and
sorting of biological cells based on their dielectric properties.
LabChip
Lab-on-a-chip (PerkinElmer’s LabChip), a miniaturized and integrated liquid han-
dling and biochemical-processing device, is used for computer-aided analytical
laboratory procedures that can be performed automatically in seconds. This as well
as the Agilent 2100 bioanalyzer is being developed in collaboration with Agilent
Technologies to integrate time-consuming and costly laboratory experiments onto a
miniature chip. The applications menu for the Agilent 2100 Bioanalyzer includes
nucleic acid analyses and protein assays – separation, sizing, quantifying and iden-
tifying what is in a sample of DNA, RNA, or proteins extracted from cells.
PerkinElmer’s genotyping system is designed to integrate each stage of the com-
plete experiment in a volume of 1 nanoliter, a scale 10,000 to 100,000-fold smaller
than currently used technology.
Biochips and Microarrays