Using material similar to bathtub caulk, University of Utah engineers invented a tiny, inexpensive "micropump" that could be used to move chemicals, blood or other samples through a card-sized medical laboratory known as a lab-on-a-chip.
"The purpose of this micropump is to make it easier for people to receive the results of medical tests when they are in the doctor's office rather than waiting a couple of days or weeks," says bioengineering graduate student Mark Eddings. "It also might deliver pain medication or other drugs through a device attached to the skin."
Bruce Gale, an assistant professor of mechanical engineering at the University of Utah, says an inexpensive, portable and easy-to-manufacture pump should aid development of a lab-on-a-chip, in which "we take all the components that would fill a room in a medical lab and put them all down on a chip the size of a credit card."
Eddings and Gale outlined development of the new micropump in the November 2006 issue of the Journal of Micromechanics and Microengineering, published Monday, Nov. 13.
Gale says labs-on-a-chip are not yet available commercially, although some are getting close. Eddings says possible uses include detection of biowarfare agents, monitoring drug levels in patients, detecting gene mutations, monitoring insulin levels in people with diabetes and many diagnostic tests.
Because liquid can flow slowly through the tiny pump, it also could be used in a drug-delivery device, such as a skin patch with tiny needles, Eddings says.
Gale expects it will take three or four years before the new micropump shows up on commercial lab-on-a-chip devices and in drug-delivery devices.
Building Tiny Pumps with Silicone Resembling Bathroom Caulk
While a lab-on-a-chip would have hundreds to thousands of micropumps sets of tiny fluid and air channels and larger chambers in which samples were tested Eddings and Gale
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Contact: Lee Siegel
leesiegel@ucomm.utah.edu
801-581-8993
University of Utah
14-Nov-2006