New Kind Of Chip Makes History In Silicon Valley

Aug. 12, 2007 -- A new kind of chip is making history in Silicon Valley. First, it's not made of sili-CON; it's made of sili-CONE. Second, instead of processing information, it processes medicine and protein. Richard Hart reports on the laboratory-on-a-chip.

There's a new chip in town. To the field of medicine, it's like the invention of the computer.

Mixing drugs, or proteins, or DNA in hundreds or thousands of tubes like this can take months. Even with a robotic device like this, testing takes too long. What if you could put this entire lab onto a single chip?

This is the chip. Think of it this way: On a circuit board or microchip, electricity flows, and transistors regulate the flow. On this chip, fluid flows through microscopic pipes, and tiny valves regulate the flow. It's a bio-processor.

Stephen Quake, Stanford University: "Well, we just view this as sort of a universal tool for chemical and biological automation. And, so in the same way that the computer chip has automated mathematics, we're trying to automate biology and chemistry."

Quake is modest about his contribution to the new field. But he put microfluidics on the map by perfecting soft lithography --the same process used to make microprocessors out of silicon, but substituting the softer silicone. Yes, the same stuff used in breast implants. Today, Professor Quake is unleashing his grad students on a vast array of potential applications.

Stephen Quake: "Well, I'm really excited about using it to study microbes. Even in your own guts. Most of what's in there can't be studied by conventional methods, because you can't culture them. And we use the chips to partition individual cells and analyze their genomes."

Shine a laser light through it, and you can optimize the creation of crystals to study protein. The magic is that the smaller the volume, the better the reaction works, because of higher concentration (or purity) of the molecules. Stanford established a foundry that will custom build fluid microprocessors. A company called Fluidigm has taken it commercial.

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STANFORD UNIVERSITY BIOENGINEERING DEPARTMENT STANFORD MICROFLUIDICS FOUNDRY
Technology: Develop and manufacture microfluidics devices.
Microfluidics processes fluids at volumes thousands of times smaller than a common droplet. A microfluidic chip is a chemical laboratory the size of your thumbnail, used to analyze DNA, combine chemicals, and observe biological reactions on a nanoscale.
Website: http://tinyurl.com/22ajx5
Pmail: Stanford University Bioengineering Department
318 Campus Drive, Clark Center E300, Stanford, CA 94305, USA

FLUIDIGM CORPORATION
Technology: Applies microfluidics to protein crystallization and genetic analysis.
Website: http://www.fluidigm.com/contact.htm
Pmail: 7000 Shoreline Court, Suite 100, South San Francisco, CA 9408, USA
Phone: 650-266-6000 (South San Francisco, CA)

BASIC MICROFLUIDIC CONCEPTS: http://tinyurl.com/2kas55

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