Objective
Inherited human genetic characteristics govern the way people may be affected during their life from cardiovascular diseases, cancer, and drug response. These illnesses represent the first three cause of death in worldwide population. The knowledge of genetic factors affecting human susceptibility to genetic-related diseases could enable physicians to safely adapt treatment to each patient. State-of-the-art techniques still suffer from time-consuming and labour-intensive procedures, which require costly and bulky equipment, as well as great quantity of costly reagents, taking several hours to deliver results. Due to needed tedious steps, these processes are also specially prone to human error. The development of rapid, low expensive and high-reliable methodology aimed at providing accurate information related to hundreds of genes in a few minutes is strongly deemed.
The SMART-BioMEMS project aims to develop a novel DNA chip with fully integrated functionality, including sample preparation, amplification, gene detection and data processing, ideally suited for ultra-fast, cost-effective point-of-care genetic analysis. Latest advances in MEMS (Micro Electro Mechanical System) technology will be addressed, possessing the appropriate potential to enable complete DNA analysis, with increased functionality and performance, at reduced costs due to the optimised consumption of costly reagents. As well, innovative active flow control elements will be integrated with the chip to precisely move minute amounts of DNA sample and reagents in a controlled way, thus maximising the performance of the whole lab-on-a-chip system.
Finally, advanced optical flow visualization techniques, including micro-PIV (Particle Image Velocimetry) and LIF (Laser Induced Fluorescence), and special micro-fluidic CFD-applications will be developed to locally quantify the flow through the micro-fluidic channels, thus leading to significant improvement in the optimisation of micro-fluidic device performance.
Fields of science (EuroSciVoc)
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques.
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques.
- natural sciencesbiological sciencesgeneticsDNA
- natural sciencesphysical sciencesclassical mechanicsfluid mechanicsfluid dynamics
- medical and health sciencesclinical medicinecardiologycardiovascular diseases
- natural sciencescomputer and information sciencesdata sciencedata processing
- natural sciencesphysical sciencesopticslaser physics
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Call for proposal
Data not availableFunding Scheme
STREP - Specific Targeted Research ProjectCoordinator
GENOVA
Italy