Technology has a habit of making possible which was previously thought impossible and we have witnessed this for hundreds of years. Yet, we can’t help but marvel at the many wonders that technology bestows upon us every now and then.
Through a continuous human effort we have been able to refine and perfect a lot of tools and techniques we use in our lives. From computers and telephones to robotics and nanotechnology, things have progressively become ever so smaller in size and yet more powerful and efficient at the same time.
This has led to revolutions in so many different industries which has changed our lives forever. But technology never stops and we are at a brink of another revolution, this time in the field of medicine, thanks to lab-on-a-chip.
At first, that term may sound really confusing, as you may ask how can an entire lab fit in a chip, but as you read more about it, you will understand how it works and the kind of life-changing importance it has for humanity in the near future.
What Is It?
In lay man’s terms, a lab on a chip, is just as it sounds. It’s a chip, on which you can perform different complex analyses which are only usually done in a laboratory. It sounds really futuristic but the technology is already here. Lab on a chip was made possible due to several other technologies coming together like nanotechnology, biotechnology and micro-electronics.
Apparently computers are not the only devices where chips are of importance. They are beginning to be used as diagnostic tools in the medicine field and as a result, we are soon going to see a complete overhaul of the health industry.
What Does It Do?
The applications of this tech is not limited to medicine as it can be used in several other areas like monitoring pollutants in the environment, chemistry, genetics and such, but for the purposes of this article, we are going to focus on the medical field.
While things like testing blood sugar levels and taking pregnancy tests can already be done simply at home, lab on a chip will enable us to perform a wide range of diagnoses, at a very low cost, reliably, easily with much faster results than even a sophisticated laboratory.
Imagine being able to diagnose any number of diseases right from your home without having to pay for expensive tests that may take days to complete the diagnosis. It will be really helpful in emergency situations where saving every minute is crucial for a patient’s survival.
The Latest News
Stanford engineers have developed a very affordable chip that can diagnose a host of diseases including HIV and Cancer and costs just $0.01 and needs just 20 minutes to make.
The team is calling this chip the FINP chip which has three layers to it. The base layer is a silicon layer that holds the biological fluids needed to make the diagnosis. The top layer is reusable and can be printed on the chip with a standard ink-jet printer. This layer contains the design for custom electronic configuration depending upon a particular disease. The middle layer separates the top layer from the base layer.
In other words, when a diagnosis will be needed to be performed in the future, a person can simply download the design for the electronics for the first layer and print it using a printer on a cheap plastic sheet. They can then place this plastic sheet over the single use silicon chamber. That’s it!
This will be so much helpful in third world countries where health care is sparse and in most cases simply not affordable. Since this chip costs only 1 cent to make, this should help billions of people in such countries who may not even be aware of the diseases that they are already infected with as is the case with HIV.
The team at Stanford is currently trying to figure out how to get this technology into the hands of as many people as they can. Once they succeed, this should easily change billions of lives for the better.
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