At NIST, the Future of Healthcare Technology Rapidly Approaches

Imagine this: out of the blue one day, you begin to feel nauseated and achy. As your body temperature soars, you smartly head to the hospital, where you are greeted by the usual intake procedure. Once you get to the exam room, though, something unfamiliar happens. Instead of collecting a few milliliters of blood into a series of test tubes which are carefully labeled and sent off to a lab that will analyze the samples and return with a complete analysis in a matter of hours, the nurse removes a few microliters -- just a couple drops, really -- of blood and ejects them onto a thin, credit card-sized chip. Within minutes, the doctor is explaining to you the bacterial infection that is at the root of your symptoms and is handing you a prescription for antibiotics.

Thanks to researchers like Dr. Samuel Stavis, this sci-fi-sounding scenario may one day be a reality. Stavis is a physical scientist in the Semiconductor Electronics Division of the National Institutes of Standards and Technology (NIST), which sounds like a field pretty far removed from making bedside lab test equipment. But Stavis' expertise in nanofluidics, the study of fluids on a tiny, tiny, scale (think fractions of a drop of liquid), and nanofabrication make him aptly positioned for developing this kind of technology. His lab at NIST's Gaithersburg, MD, headquarters looks similar to the kind he may one day make obsolete: a large Zeiss microscope setup takes center stage, surrounded by various computers and intimidating apparatuses of chrome and every color of wire. Stavis himself appears equally sophisticated; his gelled blond hair, thin metal eyeglasses, and sharp dress make him appear more like a Scandanavian businessman than a scientist, but once he begins to energetically describe his work, his engineering prowess becomes clear.

He explains that the current process of sorting nanoparticles of different sizes is a lengthy and expensive one, as it relies on costly machines like electron microscopes and laborious techniques like chromatography. "The methods we have now for separating and characterizing nanoparticles are slowing down the whole field," he says.

His solution: integrate the separation process into a single nanofluidic device. His idea came to fruition in early 2009, when he published an article describing the successful creation of a nanofluidic device with a complex 3-D structure, the first of its kind in the world. The device is a chamber with a stair-step structure, a significant departure from the traditional flat channels of this equipment, and it is this unique structure that enables the device to separate nanoparticles ranging from 10 to 620 nanometers (approximately 1% the thickness of a strand of human hair, which is around 60,000 nanometers in diameter). Like a coin sorter on a scale a million times smaller, the device traps particles at certain points along the chamber based on their size. Once particles are separated, identifying and characterizing them becomes a much simpler process.

Stavis hopes that this device will put scientists closer to achieving the so-called lab-on-a-chip technology, a method by which processes and analyses that used to depend on entire labs' worth of equipment can be performed on a chip the size of a stick of gum.

The applications of this lab-on-a-chip technology are extensive, like in criminology where it could be used for instant DNA-matching analysis (which would be particularly helpful in light of recent revelations about the massive FBI backlog of DNA cases), but the field where it could make the biggest difference is healthcare. Doctors will be able to detect bacteria, viruses, and even cancer almost instantly. Besides making analyses much faster and cheaper to perform, the mobility of this technology makes it ideal for responding to large-scale medical disasters like the recent earthquake in Haiti. It could also be especially helpful in countries with poor healthcare infrastructure, where clinics often have the proper drugs to treat infectious diseases, but lack the diagnostic tools to determine who needs treatment.

For now, these bedside lab tests remain in the realm of fiction. But with groundbreaking work and innovative thinking like Stavis's, this future may be closer than it appears.