The Transformation of Society by Microchips and Scalable Technologies: From Computers to Healthcare

Microelectronic chips have been scaled up in complexity and down in size over decades, and this progression led to a transformation of our daily lives, society, and even our way of thinking. More recently, bio-chips have transformed genomic analysis, heralding a new era of personalized medicine. Diseases, however, ultimately manifest themselves at the level of protein dysfunction and proteins thus serve as the preferred target for diagnosis and therapy. Yet current protein microchip technologies lack precision and are not scalable. I will present our efforts to develop scalable protein chips for discovering protein disease markers, and microfluidic chips for protein analysis at the point-of care. Finally, the potential of these technologies for transforming healthcare, as well as major challenges that remain, will be discussed.