Lab-on-a-chip based on BioMEMS

Innovative efforts, coupling fundamental biological and chemical sciences with technological advances in the fields of micromachining and microfabrication of silicon chips will lead to the lab-on-a-chip for large-scale diagnosis of diseases. It is a potential tool allowing simultaneous detection of a large number of disease biomarkers in a single step. The device has got tremendous advantages in terms of sensitivity, specificity, cost, time, detection limit, sample requirement and simplicity. Lab-on-a-chip would be made from an array of few hundred microcantilevers with each one of them immobilized with probe DNA/antibodies/receptors specific for their complementary biomolecules. A microcantilever is the ultra-highly sensitive microscopic beam fixed at one end and free at other end. It is just like the diving board that undergoes deflection when some weight is applied to it. Proteins and our genetic blueprint, the DNA, are keys to understand the health and illness. Their qualitative and quantitative detection can be performed economically using such miniaturized microlaboratory with a highly sensitive, simple and label-free microgravimetric assay having the detection limit extending up to picogram range. Although the technology is still in its embryonic stage but with rapid advances in the human genome project, immunology and nanobiotechnology, lab-on-a-chip would be there in the market anytime in the coming decade.