Lab-on-Chip Technology: A Review on Design Trends and Future Scope in Biomedical Applications

Lab-on-Chip (LoC) integrates various analyses such as biochemical operations, chemical synthesis, DNA sequencing onto a single chip which otherwise would have been performed in laboratory taking sufficient amount of time. Due to the miniaturization of these biochemical operations, better diagnostic speed, cost efficiency, ergonomy, sensitivity and so on can be achieved. This paper gives the detailed description of Lab-on-Chip technology including its system components. Ongoing worldwide research projects based on LoC technology have been investigated and various constraints that need to be fulfilled for designing a LoC system are presented. The biomedical applications of LoC in different fields like in diagnostics, cellomics, in environmental studies to control the effect of pathogens, to check the food quality such as for the detection of various antibiotic families in raw milk have also been discussed. Finally, the current open research issues of this technology along with the possible future research scope in the biomedical area have been presented.