Microsystems for drug discovery and biological studies

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Microfabricated Lab-on-Chip devices for genomics and proteomics have been widely researched and developed over the past decade and have gained significant acceptance among biological and biomedical researchers. The next grand challenge is the miniaturization of laboratory automation technologies for handling and manipulating living biological cells, embryos and small organisms that would enable faster analysis, lower cost, greater precision and parallelization (high throughput) over existing methods. These devices are essential in many biological studies and procedures such as embryology, in-vitro fertilization, transgenics, stem cell engineering/ transformation and in toxicology. They are also critically important in the drug discovery process where increasingly, small model organisms such as Zebrafish and C.elegans are being used for determining potent drug candidates from millions of molecules in the chemical compound libraries.