Motorola will develop manufacturing processes to mass produce biochips, and Packard will develop and manufacture the analytical instruments to process and analyze the biochips. Argonne's contribution, in conjunction with its Moscow research partner the Russian Academy of Science's Engelhardt Institute of Molecular Biology, is intellectual property in the form of 19 inventions related to biological microchips. Today's announcement is a recognition of the great diagnostic powers this technology will bring to fields as diverse as medicine and environmental restoration. Like computer chips, which perform millions of mathematical operations a second, biochips can perform thousands of biological reactions, such as decoding genes, in a few seconds. It's like speed-reading the genetic code with one hundred percent comprehension.
Conventional methods take days.
This should reduce their cost and make them widely available to genetic researchers in many fields. As part of this team, we will develop the analytical instrumentation needed to use and process biochips. This biotechnology will have myriad applications in life science, including medical diagnostics, drug discovery, environmental restoration and agriculture. Medical diagnostics is where the greatest impact is expected. Medical and biological researchers will be able to identify in minutes mutated genes that could lead to later medical problems, such as cancer, multiple sclerosis or Alzheimer's.