This topic emerged through a screening of emerging issues in science, technology and society in the context of the FET CSA OBSERVE.

http://www.horizon-observatory.eu/radar-en/index.php

The big picture

In the field of diagnostics disruptive advances maybe upcoming through a combination of several developments. On the one hand diagnostic technology is able to analyse ever more parameters with ever lighter and cheaper equipment and less time. At the same time more diseases can be detected through analysis of fluids especially blood due to advances in life sciences.

The following individual elements relate to this domain:

Microfluidics advancing Lab-on-a-Chip-technologies and other new applications

Microfluidics is a multidisciplinary field intersecting engineering, physics, chemistry, biochemistry, nanotechnology, and biotechnology, with practical applications to the design of systems in which low volumes of fluids are processed for high-throughput screening. Typically, fluids that are constrained to a sub-millimetre scale are moved, mixed or separated. Thus, processes which are normally carried out in a lab can be miniaturized on a single chip (lab-on-a-chip). Other current applications of microfluidics include inkjet printheads, DANN-chips, micro propulsion and micro-thermal technolo-gies. With the introduction of active micro components like micropumps or microvalves, a whole new range of applications will become possible in the future. Source: FET Proposals;

Micromotors in nano-scale micro-electro-mechanical systems

Researchers from different disciplines (physics, biology, medicine) have teamed up to integrate micromotors into MEMS. Once successful, this combination will allow a wide range of applications such as new lab-on-a-chip systems, pumps for micro-fluids and tuneable filters, tuneable lenses or filtering substrates for biotechnology, tissue engi-neering and regenerative medicine. Source:FET Projects;

Enhanced bloodtest functionality

Several tweets captured in the webmining addressed the growing use of bloodtests with fast DNA sequencing for disease detection (Liquid Biopsy). Specifically for the detection of cancer and brain diseases breakthroughs were reported. Source: Aggregation of several;

Cancer-detection in real-time

New insights in hyper-spectrography, advanced mathematical methods and the combi-nation of available data on more than 200 kinds of cancer make it possible to discrimi-nate between healthy and malignant tissues in real-time. This information may be used by medical doctors during surgical procedures. Source: FET Projects;

Fast HIV detection

Current methods for detecting the antibodies that indicate HIV infection are agonizingly slow and cumbersome. However a new DNA nanomachine developed by an international team of researchers (and funded, in part, by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation) could shorten the process to a matter of minutes. The DNA-based nanomachine is designed and synthesized to recognize and bind with a specific target antibody, even within biologically-dense and complex samples like blood. When these "machines" do bind with the target antibody, the joining causes a structural change that generates a little burst of light. A test that used to require hours of careful, complex and downright expensive prep-work could now take as little as five minutes. And the sooner doctors are aware of the infection, the sooner they can start treating it. What's more, these nanomachines can easily be customized to detect a wide variety of antibodies. Source: Wired;