Rapid diagnosis

According to

, a portable biosensing device based on micro- and nanotechnologies will help 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,” explained Optonanogen co-ordinator 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.”