Lab-on-a-chip and microarrays: discovery and development.

Introduction The theme of the Fifth Annual Lab-ona-Chip Conference from Cambridge Healthtech Institute (CHI) was discovery and new developments in biochip technologies as well as their applications relevant to human health, such as molecular diagnostics. Biochip is used as a broad term for various technologies including lab-on-a-chip, DNA chip, protein chip, microarrays and nanoarrays. The attendees at this multidisciplinary meeting included biologists, engineers, bioinformaticians, database developers, as well as those involved in drug development and molecular diagnostics. This is a brief overview of selected presentations at this meeting. Biochip/microarray technologies are described in more detail elsewhere [1].