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Ed Yeates reportingInstead of a doctor sending your blood samples to a big lab somewhere, how about finding out what's wrong with you in his or her office, almost immediately?
This is the usual scenario: You and your family come to your doctor. He draws blood, and then sends it off to a big lab with results pending for several days to a week.
But University of Utah engineers have a new way.
To do this, the blood sample is pumped along tiny channels on a micro chip, and pinpointed to microscopic wells. Each well performs a different test on the sample. And it all happens while you wait - right at your doctor's office.
Mark Eddings, University of Utah Microengineering: "We call these lab on a chip - shrinking down a whole laboratory process to a tiny little microchip that you can plug into a little desktop device that could give you a readout."
Results of the tests are available almost immediately, not days away. In a life threatening situation, like a sepsis infection, time is of the essence. A single chip could test 30 to 50 DNA targets from a small sample of your blood all at one time.
Dr. Bruce Gale, University of Utah Microengineering: "And we could have that information in thirty minutes, telling the doctor what antibiotic he should use, what infection you have, and what reactions you might have if he gives you certain medications."
The prototypes are enlarged for research. But size will keep getting smaller. For example on a chip size of a microscope slide, there could be thousands of wells doing thousands of tests on one sample of blood."
The counter top machine for the doctor's office - perhaps five to ten thousand dollars. But each laboratory on chip, discarded after a test, would cost only about fifty cents. Doctors could also rerun tests to double check accuracy.
The engineering team has been working with doctors monitoring the progression of multiple sclerosis. The inexpensive "laboratory on a chip" allows blood testing - not once a year - but every time the MS patient visits the office.
