Caltech scientists develop 'barcode chip' for cheap, fast b...(disease and between different individual...)

Those proteins can also change as a patient receives therapy. Thus, determining these biomarker profiles can allow doctors to create individualized treatment plans for their patients and improve outcomes. The ease and the speed with which results can be obtained using the IBBC also will potentially allow doctors to assess their patients' responses to drugs and to monitor how those responses evolve with time, much as a diabetic patient might use a blood glucose test to monitor insulin delivery.

The barcode chip is now being tested in human clinical trials on patients with glioblastoma, a common and aggressive form of brain tumor. The researchers are also using the chips in studies of healthy individuals, to determine how diet and exercise change the composition of the proteins in the blood.

Currently, the barcoded information is "read" with a common laboratory scanner that is also used for gene and protein expression studies. "But it should be very easy to design something like a supermarket UPC scanner to read the information," making the process even more user-friendly, says Fan, the first author on the paper.

"As personalized medicine develops, measurements of large panels of protein biomarkers are going to become important, but they are also going to have to be done very cheaply," Heath says. "It is our hope that these IBBCs will enable such inexpensive and multiplexed measurements."

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