Lab on a Chip

UCLA researchers have developed a tiny sensor to monitor metabolites – substances produced or used when your body breaks down food or medication – far more extensively than current methods. It could unlock better disease diagnosis and drug development.

When conducting cardiac research, it would be ideal if experiments could be performed on actual living human hearts. Scientists have developed what may be the next-best thing, in the form of a tiny mechanical heart powered by real cardiac cells.

A new breakthrough could help unravel the immune system's secrets. Researchers have created an accurate model of the human immune system in a microfluidic chip, providing a better platform to study how immune cells respond to vaccines and pathogens.

While scientists have successfully produced various "organ-on-a-chip" models of body parts, the eye is particularly challenging, as a tear film is regularly moved across its surface as we blink. That action has recently been replicated, in a new device.

One consequence of cancer and other diseases spreading throughout the body can be the hardening of the extracellular matrix surrounding cells. Scientists have now developed a new way to non-destructively detect such changes using sound waves.

Scientists have pieced together 10 devices that mimic the functions of different organs to create a functioning Body-on-Chips platform, which can offer new and comprehensive insights into how prospective drugs will behave throughout the human body.

We're seeing an increasing number of organ-on-a-chip devices, in which small pieces of living biological tissue are used to replicate the functions of actual organs. Now, scientists have created a tooth-on-a-chip, which mimics a tooth with a cavity.

With little more than a standard inkjet printer, some silicone, and a sheet of polymer film, Stanford researchers have created a reusable diagnostic "lab on a chip" that costs just 1 cent to make. This new technology could help vastly improve disease detection worldwide.

Organs-on-chips allow the study of drugs and diseases without testing on animals or humans. Now a team at Harvard has designed a device that smokes cigarettes and sends the smoke through a lung-on-a-chip, to examine just how the habit damages health.

​The organ-on-a-chip concept has been around for a while now, providing researchers with working, lab-based models of hearts, kidneys, and more. Now, researchers have created a new placenta-on-a-chip, a device that could provide insights to help prevent preterm births.

The Hoope ring is worn on the thumb, and can reportedly diagnose diseases such as syphilis, gonorrhoea, chlamydia and trichomoniasis in less than a minute. It could also be adapted to detect other conditions.

The latest advance in the area of smartphone diagnostics comes in the form of a fiber optic sensor that when attached to a phone's case, could monitor bodily fluids to test for things such as pregnancy or keeps tabs on diabetes.