Plastic chips monitor body functions

Each year, about 80,000 people in Germany become seriously ill from occlusions of veins caused by blood clots. Such thromboses can cause pulmonary embolism or even heart attacks. Even airline passengers at long distance flights can be affected by deep vein thrombosis. But with the new system, a fast and easy test of a risk of travel-related thrombosis will soon be possible.

Airline passengers would only have to relinquish one drop of blood to the measuring device. The special feature of this miniscale lab-on-a-chip: the system is designed in plastic for an inexpensive production, sheets or reel-to-reel. This would facilitate cost-efficient manufacturing of disposable diagnostic systems. Such tiny analysis systems are still science fiction. In the EU project DVT-Imp, researchers from eight European countries are developing essential foundations for the laboratory on the plastic chip.

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