In Vivo Diagnosis: A Future Direction for Biochip Technology

Liping Tang

doi:10.4172/2153-0777.S1-e002

ISSN: 2153-0777

Journal of Bioengineering and Bioelectronics

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In Vivo Diagnosis: A Future Direction for Biochip Technology

Liping Tang^*
Department of Bioengineering, University of Texas at Arlington, Arlington, Texas-76001, USA
Corresponding Author :	Dr. Liping Tang Department of Bioengineering University of Texas at Arlington Arlington, Texas-76001, USA E-mail: ltang@uta.edu
Received August 31, 2010; Accepted September 05, 2011; Published October 29, 2011
Citation: Tang L (2011) In Vivo Diagnosis: A Future Direction for Biochip Technology. J Biochip Tissue chip S1:002. doi:10.4172/2153-0777.S1-e002
Copyright: © 2011 Tang L. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.

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Abstract

Biochip technology has enjoyed rapid growth in a wide variety of research fields including genome, proteome and pharmaceutical in recent years. This rapid progress may be partially attributed to substantial research efforts on the improvement of biochip fabrication technology, which has greatly enhanced the sensitivity and reproducibility of biochips. On the other hand, rigorous research efforts have been made toward the development of a broad spectrum of microprobes, including DNA microarrays, protein microarrays, antibody microarrays and chemical microarrays, for both basic research and clinical diagnosis. It should be noted however that almost all of these biochips are designed for in vitro testing, screening or diagnosis. Despite their prospective use as powerful tools for basic medical research and medical diagnosis, the potential use of biochip technology for in vivo diagnosis has yet to be studied in depth.

Biochip technology has enjoyed rapid growth in a wide variety of research fields including genome, proteome and pharmaceutical in recent years. This rapid progress may be partially attributed to substantial research efforts on the improvement of biochip fabrication technology, which has greatly enhanced the sensitivity and reproducibility of biochips. On the other hand, rigorous research efforts have been made toward the development of a broad spectrum of microprobes, including DNA microarrays, protein microarrays, antibody microarrays and chemical microarrays, for both basic research and clinical diagnosis. It should be noted however that almost all of these biochips are designed for in vitro testing, screening or diagnosis. Despite their prospective use as powerful tools for basic medical research and medical diagnosis, the potential use of biochip technology for in vivo diagnosis has yet to be studied in depth.

Technological advances for in vivo real-time monitoring of the physiological parameters of patients, for the diagnosis of chronic diseases, are in dire need. It is well established that the pathogeneses of many immune and inflammatory diseases are dynamic processes, and as such, analysis of samples from one time point may not provide an overall picture of the active processes. Typically, the diagnosis and monitoring of such diseases requires invasive procedures often with multiple hospital visits. Such tedious and invasive procedures would be substantially reduced, if biochips could be implemented as an in vivo device and used to observe long term disease or even healthy physiological processes. One potential use of the biochip is to monitor chronic diseases, such as lung fibrosis, arthritis, multiple sclerosis, etc, for which progression of the disease is often difficult to monitor and to control. In addition, many of these localized diseases undergo rigorous tissue responses nearby the disease site. Unfortunately, there is no diagnostic tool developed for detecting and monitoring such responses and most of the current clinical tests are designed only to measure the changes of physiological parameters in circulation. It is possible that the localized physiological parameters or inflammatory processes may be observed in vivo and in situ via a biochip implanted at the disease site.

There are many challenges associated with the development of a biochip for in vivo applications. One of them is the availability of probes for in vivo monitoring and diagnosis. A lot of progresses has been made in recent years on the construction of optic probes for in vivo detection of many different inflammatory products, such as reactive oxygen species, matrix metalloproteinase, elastase, caspase and many inflammatory cell products, etc. These probes are developed with the ability to monitor the extent of inflammatory responses by reacting with different inflammatory products prior to emitting bioluminescent signals for a prolonged period of time. It may be possible that these probes can be fabricated into a micro-chip array to monitor a broad spectrum of inflammatory or immune cell responses. To prolong their efficacy, these microchip-associated probes may be fabricated to be encapsulated with degradable polymers. By controlling the degradation rates, different probes would be exposed for the designated measurement at a specific duration of time. It should be noted that some degradable polymers can stay in the patient for many years following implantation.

In the future, biochips may not only be used as routine in vitro diagnostic and research tools but also as implantable physiological probes in patients. Patients with various types of the illnesses may be implanted or even injected with a diagnosis chip monitoring device. Instead of routine hospital visits with tedious invasive tests, patients' physiological information could be collected continuously which will greatly assist their medical diagnosis with improved accuracy and minimal inconvenience.