Current Customer Challenges

Despite significant technological breakthroughs made over the last few decades in the development of complex analytical instrumentation, the measurement of relevant biological molecules such as DNA, RNA, and proteins is difficult. Customers still face serious problems in many steps of the process. For example, sample preparation can be an expensive, tedious, and laborious process laden with many error-prone manual steps. Additionally, in some areas such as DNA forensics, samples can be quite limiting.

Why Microfluidics?

Researchers typically must choose between implementing expensive, high-end robotics and relying on error-prone, manual methods for life science applications. And despite the dramatic progress that’s been made in modern analytical instrumentation, these tools are still large, consuming too much laboratory space.

Microfluidics promises automation in exquisitely small devices and offers researchers new choices that make sense for their applications. For DNA sequencing, molecular diagnostics, and human identification applications, the immediate benefits of microfluidics will be substantial and include:

	Reduction of human labor cost and error through an integrated, automated workflow
	Major savings in very expensive reagents and scarce samples
	Ability to process more samples with less space due to reduced instrument footprint.

Why Microchip Biotechnologies?

Microchip Biotechnologies (MBI) is developing several automated, microscale biological sample preparation and analytical systems that will integrate processes that have been typically pieced together in non-integrated, semi-automated workflows. Breakthrough MOV™-based microchips from MBI offer significant advantages over other microfluidics-based devices. Our exclusive MOV technology overcomes the most common shortcoming of microfluidics—poor liquid mixing due to laminar flow on chip. Most microfluidic chips rely primarily on diffusion for sample mixing, but this method limits process efficiency. MBI microchips are capable of performing more complex, integrated processes more efficiently than other microfluidic devices on the market today because of this key property.

Microfluidics and the Future

Just as semiconductor chip development enabled more mass production of powerful computing devices in smaller and smaller footprint devices, microfluidics will be the cornerstone of significantly smaller, integrated sample-to-answer devices. This technology is also poised to reduce laboratory workflow complexity through process integration and will require less skill to operate. Integrating multiple laboratory workflow steps into one smaller microfluidics-based device will also lead to more portable devices.

Sample-to-Answer: New Paradigm

Microfluidic devices will enable a new paradigm in life science applications and measurements in the field. In DNA forensics such devices could be taken to the crime scene to quickly assess suspects of violent crimes. Field-ready systems could also be useful in agriculture to perform real-time tests of crops for plant or human pathogens such as E. coli O157:H7, the bacterium that caused a multi-state outbreak of infections from contaminated fresh spinach in 2006. In human healthcare, hospitals could use these types of devices in the effort to reduce nosocomial infections with problematic microorganisms such as methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus which is currently on the rise. Microchip Biotechnologies will be launching disruptive technologies able to address many of these challenges.