IBM Touts Lab-on-a-Chip Breakthrough

The high tech giant's scientists say the technology is able to separate biological particles at the nanoscale.

Chris Newmarker

A new lab-on-a-chip developed at IBM could potentially allow physicians to detect diseases such as cancer before symptoms appear, the high tech giant announced this week. 

Tests of the chip, reported in the journal Nature Nanotechnology, show the chip separating biological particles at the nanoscale level. Separation of bioparticles took place down to the scale of 20 nm, enough for detecting particles including DNA and viruses--and most importantly, exomes that are crucial for detecting disease at its earliest stages. Shed from cells into bodily fluids such as saliva, urine, and blood, such exomes range in size from 20 to 140 nm and can provide an earlier indication of developing disease. 

The next step is to see if the technology helps in early diagnosis of cancer. IBM plans to work with researchers at Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai in New York City to see how well the chip performs detecting signs of prostate cancer biomarkers in liquid biopsies from patients. 

"The ability to sort and enrich biomarkers at the nanoscale in chip-based technologies opens the door to understanding diseases such as cancer as well as viruses like the flu or Zika," Gustavo Stolovitzky, program director of translational systems biology and nanobiotechnology at IBM Research, said in a news release.

"This extra amount of time could allow physicians to make more informed decisions and when the prognosis for treatment options is most positive," Stolovitzky said. 

The IBM chip takes advantage of a technology that the company terms as nanoscale deterministic lateral displacement (nano-DLD). It uses an asymmetric array of pillars that only allow smaller particles to flow through unabated, effectively separating particles by size without disrupting flow. The array enables the system to sort particles down to tens of nanometers resolution.

IBM says its scientists have already scaled down the size of the chip to 2 cm by 2 cm, and they're continuing to work on boosting throughput and functionality. They are seeking to increase the diversity of bioparticles that can be separated, and improving the chip's precision and specificity.

IBM employed manufacturable silicon processes to create the nano-DLD arrays for the lab-on-a-chip technology. 

Chris Newmarker is senior editor of Qmed. Follow him on Twitter at @newmarker.

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[Image courtesy of IBM]