Welcome to the Bioinformation Age…

Where every analytical chemist has their own personal laboratory sitting on their desktop…

Where assay speeds are measured in ChIPS - Chemical Interactions per Second…

And costs are calculated in pennies per analysis.

This is not some decades-distant future. This is coming SOON to a laboratory near you.

From a recent Hewlett-Packard press release:

PALO ALTO, Calif., May 11, 1998 - Hewlett-Packard Company and Caliper Technologies Corp. today announced they have signed an agreement to develop jointly the first-generation of analytical instrumentation and information systems based on Caliper's lab-on-chip technology.

Lab-on-a-chip technology. The image conjures up visions of microprocessors whipping through complex sample prep, separation, detection, and spectrum analysis tasks at unheard of speeds while analysts need only wait milliseconds for the results.

In fact, unreal as it seems, that is exactly what is happening, right now.

And that's just the beginning. Because when the first analytical task is done, the analyst then replaces instrument's central microchip with a new one designed to perform a different task, and throws the old chip away.

Disposable microchips. Not even Intel has managed that trick.

What we're talking about here is microfluidics, an idea whose time has definitely arrived.

Applying ideas originally explored at Oak Ridge National Laboratories, the University of Alberta, and Ciba Geigy, among other places, Caliper Technologies has developed a series of practical applications for microfluidics technology. Taken together, these will enable the first major advance in lab practice since Louis Pasteur first started puddling around with test tubes and beakers just like the ones you're using today.

Using miniature, integrated biochemical processing systems etched into glass, silion, quartz or plastic, Caliper's lab chips allow the same steps customarily performed in conventional instruments to be done in minute quantities at small fractions of the usual elapsed time.

The "micro" in microfluidics refers not only to lab chip dimensions, but to the quantities being manipulated. Microchip channels are on the order of 80 microns wide and 10 microns deep. The fluids move through at nanoliter/second rates.

By applying voltages to various channel intersections, the chip moves an analyte through the system, adjusting its concentration across three orders of magnitude, mixing it with buffers, separating out the constituents, adding fluorescent tags and directing the sample past detection devices.

"It's really a micro-robot," observes Caliper's Mike Knapp. "It's actually doing the experiment. It's not a real-time replacement for a pipette, it's a robotic system working on a nano scale."

Like its microprocessor counterpart, the microfluidic chip's output is digital. As a result of lab chip instrumentation, says marketing guru Regis McKenna, "the bioinformation database becomes a font of knowledge for leveraging drug discovery, biochemical tests and other types of chemical and biochemical experiments and tests."

"We think a combination of microfluidics technology and micro- electromechanical (MEM) sensor technology, applied over time, will enable the individual researcher to have an entire synthesis-analysis- screening facility on their desktop," HP's Vince Dauciunas predicts. "We think it has the power to speed things up exponentially."

Both Caliper and Hewlett-Packard are excited about the synergy generated by their collaboration. Caliper will manufacture the actual microfluidics chip sets themselves and supply them exclusively to HP for insertion into the instrumentation systems. HP will take responsibility for the manufacturing of the instrumentation, the marketing, the distribution and the support of the entire system product.

As Dauciunas points out, the early developments won't radically change the researcher's life. "She'll put this instrument, about the size of a UV-Vis system, on her desktop and do enzyme kinetics or maybe DNA sizing experiments. What will be different is that, by simply changing the chip, she can rapidly reconfigure for different types of experiments without having to reinvest in a completely different system."

The chip, the consumable that goes with the instrument, programs the device for the experiment at hand. So there will be no need to invest in five or six different types of instruments to conduct a range of experiments.

"Eventually, you'll have arrays of multi-purpose workstations around the lab," says Knapp, "and chips on hand which will convert them from, say, a flow cytometer in the morning to a DNA sequencer in the afternoon."

In combination with DNA array technology, microfluidics has the possibility to radically improve the accuracy of diagnostic tests. Instead of relying on a visual confirmation via a microscope, or a three-day culture test, DNA arrays supported by microfluidics will present a completely unambiguous detection. "It offers the promise of a hand-held genetic analysis down at the point-of-care center," says Dauciunas.

Recollecting Thomas Edison, Knapp says, "Research is supposed to be 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration. The real revolution here is that people will now be able to spend more time thinking about their information and way less time generating it."

Says Dauciunas, "What you're seeing is kind of like the Wright brothers flyer…and looking down the road 50 years to a 747. Except this is going to be a 10 or 12 year journey, not a 50 year journey."