New Biosensor Microchip Could Change Medical Testing Forever

Posted by: Mike Pallante on July 20, 2011 at 10:49AM
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A microchip no larger than one square centimeter could increase the efficiency of drug testing by a power order.

A significant part of testing new drugs revolves around understanding protein binding, or how the drug interacts with the tens of thousands of different proteins in the human body. Current technology can take hours to determine the result of protein binding and can only test 4 proteins at a time.

A new microchip developed by Stanford researchers contains an array of nanosensors that tests thousands, even tens of thousands, of different proteins in a single experiment taking mere minutes to perform.

New Methods & New Technology

The chip makes use of a new analytic model, also developed by Stanford researchers, which can anticipate the final outcome of a protein-binding experiment after only a few initial reactions, drastically reducing test time from hours to minutes.

Further, researchers used magnetic nanotags to zero in on proteins of interest. The result is researchers can test a new drug and anticipate its dangers, effectiveness and possible side effects thousands of times quicker than before.

Fighting Disease with more Effective Testing

Richard Gaster MD/PhD, the lead author of the paper highlighting the technology published in the scholarly journal Nature Nanotechnology, said, "Let's say we are looking at a breast cancer drug. The goal of the drug is to bind to the target protein on the breast cancer cells as strongly as possible. But we also want to know: How strongly does that drug aberrantly bind to other proteins in the body?"

As to the effectiveness of the new microchip in this process he commented, "We can see how strongly the drug binds to breast cancer cells and then also how strongly it binds to any other cells in the human body such as your liver, kidneys and brain. So we can start to predict the adverse affects to this drug without ever putting it in a human patient."

What should we be asking?

The project was funded in part by the National Cancer Institute and Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, a Department of Defense subsidiary.

What you should be asking:

• Is the new methodology as reliable as current technology?


• Should we be unsettled or relieved that the DoD is funding this type of research?