Engineer Designs Handheld Device Used to Diagnose Illness

It used to be that villagers in the developing world had to go to a lab to find out if they were positive for HIV and other diseases. Bioengineer Samuel Sia has figured out a way to take the lab to the village. Bioengineer Samuel Sia has designed a handheld device used to collect and analyze blood tests at a patient's bedside to diagnose infectious and other diseases. Called mChip, the handheld device uses a microchip to perform intricate medical tests for illnesses such as sexually transmitted diseases or prostate cancer. It needs just a drop of blood to diagnose a patient, and results come back in 12 to 15 minutes. This lab-on-a-chip method miniaturizes and simplifies the once time-consuming system of analyzing diagnostic tests results. "We are engineering a credit card-sized device that can produce blood-based diagnostic results in minutes.