Revolutionary lab-on-chip paves way for cheap, portable testing
Govind Kaigala and Christopher Backhouse with their lab-on-a-chip device for genetic testing.
January 30, 2008 - Edmonton - University of Alberta researchers have developed a portable unit for genetic testing, which has the same capability as a lab full of expensive equipment.
The device - along with other, even smaller units the team is now in the process of developing - paves the way for enormous savings to health-care systems and will improve care for patients. A wide variety of genetic tests, which are available but rarely used because their cost is prohibitive, will become cheap, fast and easily accessible.
Christopher Backhouse, a professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, together with Linda Pilarski, an oncology professor in the Faculty of Medicine & Dentistry, and their research team have received international recognition for the device. An article describing their shoebox-sized device appears in the Jan. 18 issue of The Analyst. The article lead author is U of A PhD student Govind V. Kaigala.
Backhouse compares the development of these 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 said.
He says miniaturization made that possible and brought the cost factor down by about a million. "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."
The heart of the unit, the 'chip,' looks like a standard microscope slide etched with fine silver and gold lines. That micro-fabricated chip applies nano-biotechnologies within tiny volumes, sometimes working with only a few molecules of a fluid or tissue sample. Because of this highly integrated chip the remainder of the system is inexpensive ($1,000) and fast.
"We can work on a drop of almost anything," Backhouse said. It takes about an hour to get the results.
There are many possible uses for such a portable genetic testing unit.
Backhouse notes that adverse drug reactions are a major problem in health care. By running a quick genetic test on a cancer patient, doctors might pinpoint the type of cancer and determine the best drug and correct dosage for the individual.
Or health-care professionals can easily look for the genetic signature for a virus or E. coli - also making it useful for testing water quality.
"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,' " he said.
The engineering team has been building and testing the units in the U of A's Micro and Nano Fabrication Facility, an open-access lab used by U of A researchers, and scientists from other universities and high-tech companies.
The work that led to the existing $1,000 system is part of a larger engineering collaboration in which electrical engineers Backhouse, Duncan Elliot and Jim McMullin from the U of A, along with Paul Charette at the Universite de Sherbrooke (Quebec), have demonstrated prototypes of a USB key-like system that may ultimately be as inexpensive as standard USB memory.
"You would put on your sample, plug it into a computer and have the answer in 15 minutes," Backhouse said
Federal agencies - the Natural Science and Engineering Research Council and the Canadian Institutes of Health Research - supported this work at the basic research stage. As well, a large portion of the Backhouse lab's activities falls under the Alberta Cancer Diagnostic Consortium project, and is currently being supported by Western Economic Diversification Canada.
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