Grant: Strategic Projects - Group

This NSERC Strategic project proposal from researchers at the Departments of Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE) at the Universities of Sherbrooke (UdeS) and Alberta (UofA) and DALSA Semiconducteur (Bromont, QC), aims at developing highly integrated microchip-based systems for performing entire health care and life science diagnostics, from sample preparation and DNA amplification to protein detection and electrophoresis. Much work has been done in developing such microfluidics-based analysis system, variously termed micro-total-analysis-systems (uTAS), "lab on a chip", or BioMEMS systems. To date, however, most efforts have typically relied upon extensive (and expensive) external instrumentation, with comparatively little functionality integrated directly onto the chip itself. In recent work we have produced highly integrated medical diagnostic prototypes based on microfluidic chips and these enable a very significant decrease in the cost of medical diagnostics. The goal of the present proposal is to miniaturize existing external instrumentation and integrate it directly onto a microfluidic chip, in order to produce a single chip BioMEMS standalone life sciences diagnostic platform. We expect that the resulting single-chip diagnostic systems will produce a dramatic decrease in the cost of these technologies, making them accessible to healthcare. From a commercial standpoint, this strategic partnership between DALSA Semiconducteur and UofA/UdeS will translate into globally competitive technologies at DALSA Semiconducteur and further contribute to making Canada a major player in this area on the world stage. )