Medical bioengineer replaces $100,000 chip fab with Shrinky Dinks

[charlie]

This lady is an equipment vendor's worst nightmare. I didn't even know Shrinky Dinks were still being made.

In 2006, Michelle Khine arrived at the University of California­'s brand-new Merced campus eager to establish her first lab. She was experimenting with tiny liquid-filled channels in hopes of devising chip-based diagnostic tests, a discipline called microfluidics. The trouble was, the specialized equipment that she previously used to make microfluidic chips cost more than $100,000--money that wasn't immediately available. "I'm a very impatient person," says Khine, now an assistant professor at the University of California, Irvine. "I wanted to figure out how I could set things up really quickly."

Racking her brain for a quick-and-dirty way to make microfluidic devices, Khine remembered her favorite childhood toy: Shrinky Dinks, large sheets of thin plastic that can be colored with paint or ink and then shrunk in a hot oven. "I thought if I could print out the at a certain resolution and then make them shrink, I could make channels the right size for micro­fluidics," she says.
...

Khine began using the chips in her experiments, but she didn't view her toaster-oven hack as a breakthrough right away. "I thought it would be something to hold me over until we got the proper equipment in place," she says. But when she published a short paper about her technique, she was floored by the response she got from scientists all over the world. "I had no idea people were going to be so interested," Khine says.
...

Khine plans to use her chips to detect various medical conditions, and she hopes the cheap and portable devices will someday be used to diagnose HIV and other infections at the bedside. She has also found that by growing stem cells in a Shrinky Dink device that contains wells instead of channels, she can coax them to become heart muscle cells. Such a tool might allow researchers trying to grow those cells for tissue transplants to control the process more closely.

Douglas Crawford, associate executive director of the California Institute for Quantitative Biosciences, sees advantages in Khine's approach. "Michelle's technique is bette­r, faster, and cheaper--it can put microfluidic prototyping into the hands of every lab," he says.

http://www.technologyreview.com/TR35/Profile.aspx?Cand=T&TRID=764

[sakabatou]

1. Wow

Who knew a toy could do so much?

[MineralMan]

2. DU gentlemen may wish to click the link...

This bright young woman has more than brains to appreciate. I'm just saying...

[n2doc]

3. Yep, no "shrinky dinks" going on here... n/t

[Wilber_Stool]

5. I just clicked

to read the whole article. Really.

[MineralMan]

7. Well, of course...

[MineralMan]

8. I wanna play with children's toys and make a living doing it, too.

Too late for me...

[malakai2]

9. Question

What if she has a shrill, warbling voice, and a cackling laugh to match? What if she has no sense of humor? What if she's a hardcore conservative? Does that diminish, or enhance, the view?

[drm604]

11. Oh yeah!

Brains and beauty. :P

[annabanana]

4. I **LOVE** this stuff.

serendippity-do!

[Speck Tater]

6. That reminded me of an article in Scientific American back in the 60's

about using fluid flow for switching logic. With this Shrinky-Dink breakthrough I wonder if fluid logic switching devices would be easier to fabricate. It seems to me that combining fluid logic and Shrinky-Dinks the ambitious home hobbiest could fabricate a microprocessor chip that runs on compressed air instead of electricity.

See also http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fluidics

[Odin2005]

10. OOH, cute and smart at the same time! I LIKE!!!

:evilgrin:

[Nihil]

12. Excellent!

Way to apply knowledge to solving the problem in hand!

:toast:

Mind you, I bet she's *really* pissed off the people who make the
"specialized equipment" at $100,000+ a pop ...

:yoiks: