A state-of-the-art portable biosensing device based on micro- and nanotechnologies will empower doctors to rapidly and accurately forewarn patients of their genetic risk of developing diseases such as cancer.
Currently being developed by the
IST project
OPTONANOGEN, a prototype of the system will initially be used to detect mutations of the
BRCA1 gene that are responsible for between 2.5 and 5 per cent of the incidence of
breast cancer in women. The final system, however, could be used to detect virtually any genetic anomaly as well as proteins linked to
viruses, chemical contamination in food or water pollution.
“There are a broad variety of applications for this system, although the main market is in biomedicine,” explains OPTONANOGEN coordinator Laura Lechuga at the National Microelectronics Centre (CNM) in Spain. “Though commercial biosensing systems exist they are larger and designed to be used in laboratories. We are the first to develop a fully integrated system on a small scale in this field.”
The final device will be roughly the size of a human hand, allowing it to be used in doctors’ surgeries to determine the genetic predisposition of a patient to certain diseases in a matter of minutes. That compares to the hours or even days it can take to carry out the same analysis in a laboratory, which is generally only used to test high risk groups such as women with a family history of breast cancer.