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'Lab On a Chip' Made From Paper and Tape
Posted by
timothy
on Tue Dec 09, 2008 12:10 PM
from the either-a-duct-a-mask-or-a-scotch dept.
from the either-a-duct-a-mask-or-a-scotch dept.
An anonymous reader writes "Researchers at Harvard University have developed a microfluidic device using ordinary paper and tape. Squares of paper are layered and connected with adhesive tape, channeling liquid horizontally and vertically in a very small area. Each square of paper has been treated with photoresist material, which creates channels that funnel liquid into tiny wells containing certain proteins or antibodies. The fluid interacts with that area of the paper and turns the well a certain color. It can, for example, detect varying concentrations of glucose. Lead researcher George Whitesides says such paper 'lab on a chip' tests may lead to a cost-effective, portable, and accurate method for diagnosing diseases in countries lacking reliable health care. The research appears in the current issue of the Proceedings of the National Academies of Science."
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Submission: 'Lab On A Chip' Made Out of Paper and Tape by Anonymous Coward
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caught red-handed (Score:5, Funny)
link to actual article (Score:2, Informative)
http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2008/12/08/0810903105.abstract [pnas.org]
Although probably you need a login for full text. Looks interesting and quite promising for low cost production. I think this technology might not only be interesting for countries lacking reliable health care but also budget strapped labs
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Can I use this to test my blood-sugar levels?
Unfortunately I doubt it would make it any cheaper. Those greedy companies charge 50 cents for each "refill" and it's really just a piece of paper.
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grants are nice (Score:5, Funny)
Re:grants are nice (Score:5, Insightful)
Millions in grant money and they came up with "a cost-effective, portable, and accurate method for diagnosing diseases in countries lacking reliable health care."
I don't care if it's made of dogshit and orange peel, if it saves lives then it's money well spent. Just because something's not made of high-tech materials doesn't mean it can't be innovative or useful. In fact low-tech often means cheap and widely available, so it can be a good thing.
Check out the pot it pot refrigerator for a innovative low-tech solution that is changing peoples' lives for the better right now.
Parent
Re: (Score:2)
Check out the pot it pot refrigerator for a innovative low-tech solution that is changing peoples' lives for the better right now
That would be: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pot-in-pot_refrigerator [wikipedia.org]
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I think we can see their real purpose described in the linked article [technologyreview.com]:
Whitesides holds up his group's latest development: a square slightly thicker than the other samples, covered in a grid of yellow, greed, red, and blue dots.
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If you want to overclock (Score:5, Funny)
Instead of regular tape, you could use duct tape.
Re: (Score:1)
Instead of regular tape, you could use duct tape.
But for US military field operations they will use military spec cellophane tape that will only cost $42,876.52 per 10 ft. roll.
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
That extra money is to fund the Men in Black, and I'm ok with that ;)
tape and ordinary paper? (Score:5, Insightful)
I'd be willing to hazard a guess that it's not the paper or tape that will be making up the bulk of the testing device's price.
Re:tape and ordinary paper? (Score:4, Funny)
My computer is made from Rocks. All they needed to is Heat and cool mix with different rock add some water and other chemicals and mix some more Heat and cool some more and finally I have a computer made from rocks.
Parent
Re: (Score:1, Funny)
Yeah, well my computer is a top of the line Dell, made of silicon, and several types of metals.
Oh, and some plastic too.
BEAT THAT!
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I though string theory has been replaced with hyper gravity?
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Yes but Hyper Gravity has been replaced by Plucky Magnetism already, which is about to be replaced by Sneaky Waveforms if some researchers can get their paper approved.
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Mine is a collection of randomly associated particles which have happened to coalesce in a statistically improbable form due to the quantum nature of the universe.
Any moment now it will turn into a horny blonde with big boobs and I will have sex with it.
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That's funny. My computer is made from sand.
That's funny, sand is the remains of eroded/weathered rock. Also, most of the Earth's mantle and crust are made up of silicate rocks (wiki) [wikipedia.org]. My sand is made of up of local random silicate minerals, maybe some feldspar, quartz, biotite and muscovite (my sand is weathered/eroded granite).
The silicates are the largest, the most interesting and the most complicated class of minerals by far. Approximately 30% of all minerals are silicates and some geologists estimate that 90% of the Earth's crust is made up of silicates. With oxygen and silicon the two most abundant elements in the earth's crust silicates abundance is no real surprise.
Ref [galleries.com]
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> GENERATION 25: The first time you see this, copy it into your sig on any forum and add 1 to the generation. Social expe
Your expe has a bug.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Or your doctor could test your blood for know cancer proteins each time you go in to visit him. Or inspectors could analyze a water samples in real time in third world countries without the infrastructure to do the testing the normal way. Or any number of other things that that the technology could be used for.
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So what. If people are being disappeared, the justification doesn't really matter.
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I wasn't justifying it. I also think its wrong, just inevitable.
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That isn't what I meant. If a cop can disappear you for not having papers, then a cop can take away your papers and then disappear you for not having papers. So if there is some reason that makes it okay for the cop to disappear people, all he has to do is use that reason, and he can disappear any people he wants.
More directly (but still obliquely...), fight the disease, not the symptoms.
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I just spent my last mod point otherwise I'd help get that "Troll" mod off you. Whoever added that doesn't understand what a troll is apparently.
Instant DNA tests are just a tool like anything else. They can be used for good or for bad. Perhaps the Nazis 2.0 will use them in a quest of 'racial purity' and imprison or kill a lot of innocent people. Or perhaps they'll be used to perpetuate genocide in Africa and the ME when it is available to them.
At the same time who knows what kinds of medical advances
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He's back! (Score:4, Funny)
I'm not so sure, yet . . . (Score:5, Funny)
. . . I briefly skimmed the article, and neither a "Mullet" nor a "Swiss Army Knife" was mentioned.
Those are the two of the critical ingredients in Macgyver Stew.
Parent
Countries that *don't* lack reliable health care? (Score:5, Insightful)
"...such paper "lab on a chip" tests may lead to a cost-effective, portable, and accurate method for diagnosing diseases in countries lacking reliable health care."
How about a cost-effective, portable, and accurate method in countries where we're used to overpaying for the NON-cost-effective methods?
Re:Countries that *don't* lack reliable health car (Score:4, Interesting)
Don't hold your breath. While the chip itself might be cheap to manufacture, its going to run into the same problems that have plagued immunochromatographic diagnostic technologies for years:
1. Antibodies are extremely expensive relative to other reagents that can be used (acid fast staining for mycobacteria, nucleic acid stains for plasmodia and other parasites, etc).
2. Its impossible to get a measure of the "confidence" of a measurement using this type of technology, so verifying results requires performing a completely different diagnostic test. But if you have no idea which tests gave confident results and which did not, how do you know which results to verify?
3. Cell-phone cameras are useless for quantitative analysis, especially ones that would need high dynamic range and high accuracy
4. Quality control and assurance is a bitch. Ask any epidemiologist that has experience working with malaria RDTs in the field. Some of them last 6 months, some last 1 month on the shelf.
5. In high-burden areas for certain diseases, using a disposable test methodology becomes extremely cost-ineffective.
While this might be interesting for things like simple urine tests or blood sugar tests, diagnosing infectious diseases represents a massive challenge for technologies like this. There's a reason we still use century-old microscopy-based technologies for diagnosing things like active TB and malaria even though they suck. I don't blame the researchers, they do good work and aren't focused on building a real product. Its the journalists that somehow make the leap between "we can detect glucose" and "revolutionary diagnostic technology."
And yes, IAABME.
Parent
Re: (Score:2, Insightful)
Liability, due to bad jury decisions, is responsible for a big chunk of health care costs. So is the AMA, which controls the number of student positions available.
(Doctors *should* be held responsible for mistakes, but the current system doesn't do it right, there is not a reasonable relationship between the severity of the mistakes and the penalties imposed)
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The major point here is that the current health care industry in this country is far from being a "free market". From the FDA to the AMA to all of the regulation and restrictions surrounding the operation of a hospital.
At this point, I'm not arguing that those are bad, but that they serve to create artificial shortages, socialize certain aspects of the industry, and create very high barriers to entry for some fields. The merits of this are open for discussion, but it certainly can't be considered a fre
It doesn't work! (Score:2)
Cool, but not as cool as ... (Score:3, Interesting)
... microfluidic Shrinky-dinks [rsc.org]! All you need is a laser printer, shrinky dinks, and a toaster oven. :-)
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What do you need the toaster oven for? Just have the laser printer run at 1 page per min rather than 25, and the fuser will take care of shrinking the sugstrate...
Cool but (Score:4, Insightful)
The third world has been using test strips fine for the last n years. These 3D paper things don't seem to really be any easier to use or really cheaper to make.
Just because they're made from paper and tape does not mean they can be made in a mud hut. The critical part is treating the carrier with the reactants still requires a clean lab environment.
next up cardboard (Score:1)
It's a Tri-corder (Score:2)
Probably McCoy gave them a visit.
sure... (Score:2)
paper and tape, that's all!
oh, and a bit of toxic light sensitive polymer that costs a few hundred dollars per liter and needs to be processed in a clean room...
Sarcasm aside, using paper to both drive the capillary action and do some basic separation in a microfluidic style device is a pretty neat idea. Sometimes researchers are so caught up in the cutting edge stuff that they forget the old methods which just work. Harvard professors aren't always turning to cheap pregnancy tests for inspiration. The p