Fictional inventor Wayne Szalinsky built a shrink ray while wearing a Caltech hoodie in the film Honey, I Shrunk the Kids. And a shrunken sub and its five-person crew cleared a blood clot deep inside someone’s brain in Fantastic Voyage. Now Axel Scherer, Caltech’s Bernard Neches Professor of Electrical Engineering, Applied Physics and Physics, is miniaturizing medical equipment without benefit of a shrink ray. Q: What do you do? A: There’s a fantastic scene in Star Trek: The Next Generation where a silicon-based life form calls Captain Picard “you ugly bag of mostly water,” which is a really bad insult. But it’s true—we are bags of skin containing mostly water, and if we know what’s in the water, we can tell whether we’re going to be sick. Most health care today is after the fact, which is very inefficient. Your body reacts to some problem—you run a fever or feel dizzy, or whatever—and if it doesn’t go away, you go to the emergency room, and someone tries to figure out what’s happened. So, our goal is to build tiny chemical laboratories that will function inside the body and allow you to know there’s a problem before you get symptoms, and you can seek treatment

The post From Lab-on-a-Chip to Lab-in-the-Body: The Role of Nanotechnology in the Miniaturization of Medical Diagnostic Tools has been published on Technology Org.

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