International Symposium on LifeChips 2006

Applying Semiconductor Technologies and Metrology Tools to Biomedical Research: Manipulation and Detection of Single Molecules
The long-term potential for molecular diagnostics to detect and diagnose disease at its earliest stages, and to select the best treatment for each patient, holds great promise. Achieving this vision will require major advances in our ability to distinguish and stage diseased individuals relative to healthy individuals at very early stages of disease based on analysis of bodily fluids and tissue samples. As the semiconductor industry continues to drive Moore’s law towards ever smaller device geometries, transistors reach a size scale that is comparable to that of individual biological molecules. At this scale, the devices themselves are capable of interacting directly with biomolecules, creating opportunities for creating new types of sensors. But perhaps more importantly, the metrology techniques and tools developed to characterize these nm-scale devices may be redirected towards analysis of biological molecules at ultra-low concentrations to create highly sensitive instrumentation for biomolecular analysis. This talk reports on some first steps towards this goal, with emphasis on a set of techniques for molecular analysis at the yoctomolar concentration level in non-complex solutions.

Biography
Dr. Andrew Berlin directs Intel Corporation's newly formed Biomedical and Life Sciences business within the Intel Digital Health Group. Dr. Berlin chairs the Technical Advisory Board of the Canary Foundation, an organization dedicated to development of techniques for early cancer detection. He has also served on the board of directors of the MEMS Industry Association, and on a variety of advisory boards in the Biotechnology and Microsystems fields. Dr. Berlin holds 41 US patents and dozens of international patents in the areas of MEMS, Microsystems, and Biotechnology. He received S.B., S.M., and Ph.D. degrees from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.