IBM’s tiny innovation fits function
of an entire biochemistry lab into a silicon chip
Orange County, CA - August 3rd 2016 - Earlier this week, IBM announced the development of a silicon chip that can achieve the equivalent of an entire laboratory. Equipped with this new device, IBM will be partnering with the Icahn School of Medicine Cedar Sinai to test the chip’s efficiency in aiding prostate cancer detection. If successful, physicians hope the device will aid in disease diagnosis before symptoms surface.
According to the report published in Nature Nanotechnology, IBM scientists created the minuscule detection device via nanoscale deterministic lateral displacement (nano-DLD) technology. This technique utilizes an asymmetric pillar array system that sorts nanoparticles down to tens of nanometers resolution.
The process consists of a liquid biopsy sample being continuously passed through a 2cm by 2cm chip dividing biological particles at nanoscale. The pillars deflect larger pieces while allowing smaller ones to flow through the gaps and through channels organizing the bioparticles by size. Once separated, the sample is analyzed for biomarkers of disease.
The chip has the ability to sort the particles down to 20 nanometers (nm), 100 times smaller than the diameter of a human hair. Before the advent of IBM’s lab-on-a-chip innovation, previous on-chip technology could only achieve bioparticle separation down to a size that measures 50 times larger. Targeting particles in this smaller range allow researchers to investigate disease-causing particles, such as proteins, viruses, DNA, and exosomes.
Although discovered over 30 years ago, exosome research only began to gain traction recently. As vesicles, exosomes are secreted by cells and are intrinsic to intercellular communications. Accessible through bodily fluids such as blood, salvia, and urine, these vesicles contain nucleic acid and protein information from the originating tissue. With this knowledge, researchers can examine the health of the cell the exosome emerged from, allowing them to determine whether a disease is in development.
According to Dr. Carlos Cordon-Cardo, Chairman of the Department of Pathology at Mount Sinai Health System, this technology facilitates multidimensional examination of diseases with the potential to reform healthcare administration. Cordon-Cardo believes a shift from tissue samples to an emphasis on noninvasive procedures like liquid biopsies can foster efficient preventative care and better diagnoses methods.
"By bringing together Mount Sinai's domain expertise in cancer and pathology with IBM's systems biology experience and nanoscale separation technology, we’re looking for specific, sensitive biomarkers in exosomes that represent a new frontier and potential answers to whether a person has cancer, or how to treat it," Cordon-Cardo said.