European Collaborative Research to Develop Lab-on-Chip System for Cancer Diagnosis

At the Engineering in Medicine and Biology Conference (EMBC) in Buenos Aires, Argentina, imec and its project partners announced the launch of the European Seventh Framework Project MIRACLE. The MIRACLE project aims at developing an operational lab-on-chip for the isolation and detection of circulating and disseminated tumor cells (CTCs and DTCs) in blood. The new lab-on-chip is expected to be an essential step towards faster and cost-efficient diagnosis of cancer.

So far, the detection analyses of these cells have been performed in medical laboratories requiring labor-intensive, expensive and time-consuming sample processing and cell isolation steps. A full tumor cell detection analysis can take more than a day. According to a press release issued by imec yesterday, lab-on-chip, integrating the many processing steps, would enable a faster, easy-to-use, cost-effective detection of tumor cells in blood.

Within the framework of the MIRACLE project, imec as project coordinator, collaborates with the Universitat Rovira I Virgili (Spain), the Institut für Mikrotechnik Mainz, AdnaGen, ThinXXs and Consultech (Germany), MRC Holland (The Netherlands), the Oslo University Hospital (Norway), the KTH Royal Institute of Technology, Multi-D and Fujirebio Diagnostics (Sweden), ECCO – the European CanCer Organisation and ICsense (Belgium) and Labman (UK). The project aims at developing a fully automated and integrated microsystem providing the genotype (gene expression profile) of CTCs and DTCs starting from clinical samples. MIRACLE is partly funded by the European Commission (FP7-ICT-2009.3.9).

Tags: European Seventh Framework Project MIRACLE, IMEC