New Tool For Imprinting Biochips

To develop a new biochip printing technique combinations of microfluidic techniques with beam pen lithography and photochemical surface reactions were used which involves exposing a biochip’s surface to specific organic reagents, then tightly focused beams of light are used to adhere the immobilized reagents to the chip surface. This technique will allow for repeat exposure of a single chip to the same or different factors and imprint the reactions on to different sections of the biochip, which results in a biochip that can accommodate more probes than is achievable with current platforms.

3D printing has taken another step forward with this tool, which is basically a new multi-dimensional nanoscale printer with greater imprint capabilities and greater complexity on the surface of biochip than any technology currently available commercially, that will help researchers to gain a better understanding of how cells and biological pathways work.

Another benefit of this development is that it allows a variety of delicate materials to be printed reliably including lipids, glasses, and metals, on the length of scale biological interactions without the need to use a clean room. It also allows for more reactive probes to be fit on a single chip, which could reduce the cost of biochip facilitated research.