Device could aid lab-on-a-chip

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,’ said 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, said 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 today.