Healthy Outlook Blog

“The idea of a lab on a chip is to shrink all of the diagnosis and analysis that takes place in a chemistry or medical laboratory to the size of a microchip,” says Aaron Hawkins, Ph.D., a Brigham Young University researcher whose team has devised a chip that can detect specific proteins and viruses from the amount of blood a pinprick would yield.

Here’s where some of the research in this area is headed: using a chip and a hand-held analyzing device the size of an iPod, your doctor or favorite TV crime scene investigator could place a speck of blood, saliva or semen on a chip that’s as inexpensive and disposable as a tongue depressor, slip the chip into the analyzer and get results within minutes. Say goodbye to the days of waiting and worrying about lab test results.

Dr. Hawkins estimates that lab on a chip diagnosis in your doctor’s office is at least five years away. Right now, the technology is being studied for diagnosis of diseases and infections, food allergies, your risk of gum disease (from a telltale protein in saliva), to monitor the healing of head trauma, detect the virus that causes dengue fever, analyze dust from Mars for signs of life. And much more. Conceivably, your favorite TV forensics hot shot (and his real-life counterparts) specialists could get an instant DNA profile from blood or semen at the crime scene and flash it to a national DNA databank. Crime solved, roll the credits.

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Want to keep up with this space age technology? Here’s a magazine devoted to the subject.