 |
July 22, 2003 – Although there now are dozens of companies in Europe making new microarray and microfluidic devices for very specific applications, European industry has yet to commercialize lab-on-chip (LOC) devices that can be used in a more flexible way. “We are looking for the flexibility of a mass spectrometer or a chromatograph for quality control in industry,” said Andreas Manz, an Imperial College of London professor and pioneer in LOC technology.
Despite current limitations, the future of labs-on-a-chip looks “very good,” especially in drug discovery, according to Stephen Rawlings, a principal at Albion Biotech. “The need to reduce cost per assay is the driving force — roughly 75 percent of the cost of drug screening is related to the consumption of reagents, so that any reduction in the cost of assay chemicals, standards and controls is very desirable,” he said.
Squeezing more sample onto a LOC not only reduces reagents, but also cuts labor costs. “Similar arguments could be made for development of LOCs for point-of-care medical diagnostic or indeed environmental detection devices,” Rawlings said.
 |
Manz points to Casect, an Imperial College London spinout, as the cutting edge of environmental detection using LOC. It is 18 months away from selling gas sensors that can detect toxic substances in the air.
J. Malcolm Wilkinson, an expert on MEMS and biotech applications at Technology for Industry in the United Kingdom, believes that LOC could make great strides in early detection of cancer. He points to the New Jersey-based I-Stat Corp.’s microsensors as indicative of the progress already made. I-Stat sells portable whole blood analysers with microsensors.
Europe’s lab-on-a-chip focus is protein microarrays. “Affymetrix is dominating the DNA microarray market, leaving protein analysis as an opportunity,” Rawlings said.
It’s one that DiagnoSwiss SA has picked up on. It is making low-cost polymer microchip arrays for protein analysis. A growing list of such devices is being commercialized. The proof is that firms such as Zurich-based Zühlke Engineering AG are finding a lot of business converting “lab experiments” from the likes of Zeptosens AG, Bionas GmbH and Novartis AG into mass-manufacturable products.
What has hindered progress in the past is the lack of convergence in educating potential LOC makers. Until very recently researchers had to choose between liquid handling or sensing, according to Alain Grisel, of Microsens in Neuchatel.
Plastic electronics is also exciting interest in labs-on-a-chip. “Transistors can be produced by using things like inkjet printing eliminating the need for the high temperature and vacuum conditions used in depositing features on chip wafers, making the whole thing compatible with biological samples,” Rawlings said.
The other lab-on-a-chip trend, at least on the detection end of the market, is the selling of modules rather than discrete devices, including industry standard application interfaces such as LabView that enable integration into subsystems more easily. Microsens and AppliedSensors in Sweden are typical of this trend.