Abstract

From Lab on a Chip Devices to True Care@Home Solutions: Opportunities and Bottle Necks

Antoni Homs, Senior Researcher, Catalan Institute of Nanoscience and Nanotechnology (ICN2)

25 years after their official postulation, miniaturized devices performing all the operations required for analytical procedures are still not a reality in clinical practice. In fact, the so called micro total analysis systems, or lab-on-a-chip devices, have not even substituted many clinical labs bulky instruments. Scientifically speaking, phenomena at the micro and nano scales have been, and continue being, studied to the point that many of them are well known and suitable for engineering. Patents from the early days of microfluidics keep on expiring but commercial devices based on these technologies are still relatively rare and of limited application. These technologies show great promises to achieve automated systems, with low sample and reagents consumption, able to manipulate, prepare and quantify, cells, exosomes, proteins and nucleic acids of clinical relevance. The potentiality to combine these phenomena into more complex microsystems, allowing direct multiplexed quantified information extraction from the patient sample, has strong implications which would help the health systems worldwide to improve their management. In the years to come, these health systems face many challenges that include: increasing quality while lowering costs in economically developed countries, which have an increasing percentage of aged population; providing control to epidemic focusses in economically depressed countries, which lack of infrastructures; and allowing sustainable access to medical technologies to large populations in emerging economies, which will demand for quality. On the other hand, pharmaceutical companies face a landscape that could shake their businesses, if we consider the increasing interest and need for patient-tailored treatments, making companion diagnostics ineludible in many cases, and the continuous tendency of drug and biomarkers discovery increasing costs. The combination of disposable lab-on-a-chip devices with information and big data managing cou