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Diagnosing diseases is basically the frontlines when it comes to fighting against illnesses and how effectively and efficiently this is done will affect how the rest of the battle goes. Unfortunately, diagnosis can be expensive, depending on the disease. Thanks to a new microchip, which can cost only $0.1 to create, this might not be a problem anymore.
The microchip in question was created by a team of engineers from Stanford who published their findings in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Not only is the chip tiny, it’s also incredibly inexpensive to produce and can be manufactured at a large scale in a very short period of time.
“For the developing world, point-of-care (POC) diagnostics design must account for limited funds, modest public health infrastructure, and low power availability,” the paper reads. “To address these challenges, here we integrate microfluidics, electronics, and inkjet printing to build an ultra–low-cost, rapid, and miniaturized lab-on-a-chip (LOC) platform.”
Calling it the FNIP chip, the researchers created the device with three layers of varying expendability. As for how it is used, it’s basically a two-step process. First, the user would need to customize the configuration in order to suit the particular disease that needs to be diagnosed, Futurism reports. Next, the necessary samples for analysis can then be printed onto the top layer of the chip.
So, which diseases can this microchip detect? So far, the researchers tested it to analyze cancer fluid and succeeded. They also used it to diagnose immune cells and was able to pull off similar results as another diagnostic tool that would have cost $100,000 in comparison.
Before anyone gets too excited, however, the researchers are saying that it would take some time before the microchip becomes widely available. There are some hurdles to overcome first, including more tests to see if the platform is even safe to use.
