Courtesy of Caliper Technologies
Imagine visiting the doctor's office for a routine annual checkup. Instead of drawing several vials of blood for analysis by an outside diagnostics lab, the doctor collects a single drop. Using a breadbox-sized instrument, she runs 20 or so tests in a matter of minutes and discusses the results with you before you leave. Meanwhile, a large pharmaceutical company down the road is using a similar, albeit larger instrument to analyze the biochemical properties of a million potential lead drug compounds per hour, using picoliter samples.
Such is the promise of so-called "lab-on-a-chip" technology, which combines microfluidics (liquid handling on a nanoliter to femtoliter scale) with microfabrication techniques developed by the semiconductor industry. The resulting chips, some no larger than a computer microprocessor, perform biochemical reactions from many tiny samples in parallel, in theory reducing costs and conserving reagents while greatly improving speed and reproducibility for ...
