Business Aspects of Biochip Technologies

In the context of this chapter, biochips are defined as microscale bioanalytical devices that incorporate microfluidic circuitry, highly parallel functionality, or both. Microfluidic circuitry has yielded the lab-on-a-chip concept in which functions such as sample processing, reagent combining, component separation, and detection all occur in sequence on microscale integrated devices. Highly parallel functionality manifests in DNA microarrays, which often contain many thousands of addressable DNA fragments, each capable of hybridizing with a complementary target.