Medical diagnostics

Microfluidic chips allow highly parallel measurements at low costs, thereby enabling cost effective and broad screening for relatively rare genetic diseases. The calculation is roughly as follows: one devises a single chip that screens for a thousand different genetic diseases, each of which occurs in only one in a million people. Then one in every thousand patients will have a condition diagnosed, thus rationalizing the cost of the test for diseases that were previously prohibitively expensive to screen for. There is also a tremendous need for inexpensive, self contained diagnostic tools in developing countries, for which microfluidic devices could be an excellent solution.