Thin film electronic devices marry lab-on-chip applications

Lab-on-Chip technology is gaining great interest due to the many possibilities that it offers in the fields of life sciences, from parallel analysis in genomics to point-of-care devices in medical diagnostics. At the beginning, Lab-on-Chip devices essentially consisted of a microfluidic network that miniaturized the analytical procedures leading to faster reaction kinetics and lower sample and reagents consumption. Recent devices integrate several functional modules, that allow all the functions of a human-scale test laboratory including transferring samples, drawing off a precise volume of a chemical product, reagent mixing, DNA extraction, detection and quantification of biomolecules.