Biotechnology Applications of Biochip Technology

Biotechnology is currently making use of DNA biochip/microarray technology in the research sector, and industrial applications are in development. Diagnostic applications of biochips in health care require a time-consuming and expensive validation process. Nevertheless, the potential applications in health care provide the greatest area of potential growth with an emphasis on the point-of-care and personalized medicine in which biochip technology will play an important role. Other major types of biotechnology where biochips are playing a role include food safety testing, water quality control, screening of blood for transfusion purposes and forensic identification. With the current threat of biological warfare, biochip technology will play an important role in devices for rapid field detection of biochemical warfare agents.

Biochips are computer-chip look-alikes intended to perform biochemical procedures speedily, reliably and inexpensively in the field of biology/medicine. That is why the potential for their use lies in biotechnology applications.

What Is The Biotechnology Role Of Biochips?

Biochips are ultra miniaturized processors doing complex tasks. The real interest behind biochips is the huge wave of potential it could bring to the IT and computer industry of the future. This however is still some way away and the current applications of biochips lie mostly in medical sector, although the entire biotechnology sector stands to benefit. We set out below to give some idea of the potential of biochip technology and the current focus in the medical arena.

Biochip Uses

In a manner similar to the polymerase chain reaction (PCR), microarrays have multitude of applications many of which will develop and evolve over time. Though the first application of biochips was in gene expression monitoring, the strategy of using an ordered array of biomolecules on a chip to examine a biochemical sample is generally applicable. In addition to gene expression analysis, hybridization-based assays have been used for mutation detection, polymorphism analysis, mapping, evolutionary studies, and other applications. Microarray assays, small molecules, and other proteins, but these applications have yet to be developed. Biochips give researchers the ability to examine the effects of diseases, environmental factors, drugs and other treatments on thousands of genes simultaneously. The rapid movement of healthcare toward genomics-based medicine is providing makers of biochips and associated technologies the opportunity to capture lucrative rewards in the near future in the form of array biopharma.

Potential Of Array Biopharma

As innovation continues to improve and spawn new biochip technologies, pharmaceutical companies will quell their voracious appetites for increasing profits by shortening drug development and regulatory approval processes. Additionally, some types of biochips will soon appear in diagnostics settings. Bioelectronics detection, and similar technologies make some biochips extremely conducive to the rapid detection of single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs), single tandem repeats (STRs) and other genetic variation.

The emerging biochip and microarray technologies are poised to transform how drug discovery is conducted in the future. The DNA microarray technologies have already had tremendous impact on how researchers probe and understand biology, and the emerging protein microarray technologies promise to have a similar impact. Further, the emerging biochip technologies are predicted to play a transforming role in vitro point of care and near patient care diagnostics. The major advantages that these technologies offer are several. They allow for massively parallel analysis, reduced reagent costs, dramatically reduced time to perform the analysis, the potential for fully automated systems, and reduced laboratory space requirements. Biotechnology is likely to be transformed through the use of biochip technology.
Future Of Biochip Development

There are essentially three developments going on that aim to improve the presently available technique and to fulfill the requirements for second-generation microarray systems:

New methods for label-free detection of the hybridization signals

Automatable flow-through systems

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