Commercial Acceptance of Lab-on-a-Chip Technology

Thanks to constant efforts to harness microfluidics and microTAS (total analytic systems) to improve the design and function of lab-on-a-chip (LOC) technology, its distinct advantages are now pushing commercial use. LOCs will have a significant impact on the diagnostic industry, both for centralized labs and point-of-care testing. With the current worldwide market for diagnostics more than U.S.$25 billion, LOCs have immense potential in this area.

"While conventional laboratory analysis is time-consuming, tedious, and requires expensive equipment and highly trained personnel, bench-top analysis in LOCs can be several times cheaper and faster,” explained Katherine Austin, an analyst from Technical Insights, a business unit of Frost & Sullivan, an international market analysis firm (London, UK).

LOCs are also being used in high-throughput drug screening, a large-scale and automated process requiring technology that achieves higher accuracy and throughput compared to standard, macroscale automated equipment. Much of the success of LOCs is due to microfluidics, enabling technologies such as micro-electromechanical systems (MEMS), which allow production of several identical systems concurrently. Also, the need to combat terrorism and biowarfare is driving LOC research, making it the "next big thing” in bioanalytic applications. Besides DNA analysis, there is a growing demand for easy-to-use analytic LOC systems that ensure safety of air, food, and water.

In Italy, scientists are considering the use of polymers and plastics in the LOC design in order to reduce the costs associated with silicon and glass. Despite initial compatibility issues, researchers are learning to work with plastics by applying surface modifications or coatings and manipulating polymer chemistry. A significant portion of commercial manufacturing of LOCs focuses now on disposable chips, cards, or discs through inexpensive injection molding. These LOCs are easier to manufacture and handle, aiding the development of lower-cost, more rugged, and flexible electronic devices.

However, the high development cost of microfluidics is a significant issue that threatens to slow the adoption of LOC devices. Many target customers have installed expensive dispensers and high-throughput screening systems, which means the market for LOC microfluidic systems is likely to be limited unless the technology demonstrates sufficient benefits to justify additional investment or sufficient flexibility to integrate into existing systems.

"Portability, rapid assay times, and smaller sample requirements are predicted to aid the early adoption of LOC technology by the defense and public health sectors. These attributes are likely to take precedence over cost,” noted Dr. Austin.

Microfluidic research is also moving away from single-task devices that are not reconfigurable toward integrating multiple functions such as sample preparation, enzymatic reactions, filtration, and electrospray ionization onto the same chip. In Sweden, researchers have developed a nano-lab on a compact disc (CD), which can process 480 protein samples simultaneously within an hour, for peptide mapping or sequence analysis in mass spectrometry. The nano-lab is expected to gain wide acceptance in proteomics while popularizing the use of microfluidics in other fields.

At this point, almost anything can be embedded into an active microfluidic LOC, including sensors, filtration membranes, optics, digital readouts, and global positioning system chips.




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