IBM has come up with lab-on-a-chip technologies that help in shrinking down all of the lab processes that is required to uncover certain diseases into a flat, 2-by-2 centimeter square. It is basically the concept of miniaturizing chemical and biochemical analysis.
Details of the study are published Nature Nanotechnology journal.
IBM Nanobiotechnology Group researcher Joshua Smith said, “The goal is to shrink down to a single silicon chip all of the processes necessary to analyze a disease.”
The analyzing process is usually carried out in a full-scale biochemistry lab.
Smith added their technologies are a helpful by being faster, portable, and easy-to-use. More to all these, it need less sample volume for disease detection.
Placing blood, urine, or saliva sample will result with separation of biological markers of the sample by tiny size as small as 20 nanometers to help doctors analyze diseases including cancer ahead of any physical symptoms too. It is believed treatment of the diseases can be kicked off before those can progresses.
Smith further adds the technologies can even help doctors in measuring how the patient is doing after treatment.
Meanwhile, professor at the University of Buffalo and director of the UB2020 Strategic Initiative in Integrated Nanostructured Systems, Mark Swihart, said identifying markers excreted by just a few cells is difficult.
