Lab on a Chip: Scandinavia

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Examples of early Scandinavian papers on microfluidics, miniaturized sensors and integrated systems date back to the early to mid-90s. At that time, the emergence of lab-on-a-chip systems and micro-Total-Analysis-Systems was driven on the one side by analytical chemists trying to incorporate and miniaturize all steps of an analytical process. Here, separation methods and, in particular capillary electrophoresis, played a central role in those early days. Coming from another angle, engineers with experience in semiconductor technology, microfabrication and fluid mechanics were also investigating novel ways to manipulate fluids in confined spaces and apply this to problems in chemistry, biology and medicine. Both ‘‘camps’’ have a strong tradition in Scandinavia, which is why it is hardly surprising that Scandinavian researchers at academic institutions, as well as in companies, were involved in the establishment of the field of lab-on-achip from the get-go. Across the Scandinavian territory a number of nucleation points can readily be found. In particular, the Uppsala region in Sweden pioneered early developments in industry, headed by Pharmacia Biotech, which had a research unit at the time doing very early developments in hot embossed polymer microchannels for microfluidic manipulations. This later gave rise to Gyros AB, developing centrifugal microfluidics-based assays and sample preparation. Also, the SPR technology and the commercialization of immuno affinity interaction instrumentation was pioneered in Uppsala by Biacore. Since then, many other strongholds, from Aalto University in Finland to the centers in the Oslo area and Trondheim in Norway, to KTH, Chalmers, Linkoping and Lund in Sweden and on to DTU in Denmark, have been established and continue to thrive. An important milestone for the consolidation of LOC research in Scandinavia and an acknowledgement of the research quality in the region was certainly the MicroTAS conference in Malmo in 2004, the major international conference on miniaturized systems for application in the life sciences, at that time attended by about 750 people. Department of Measurement Technology and Industrial Electrical Engineering, Lund University, Lund, Sweden. E-mail: thomas.laurell@elmat.lth.se Department of Micro and Nanotechnology, Technical University of Denmark, Lyngby, Denmark. E-mail: joerg.kutter@nanotech.dtu.dk