Development of micro/nano devices for cancer diagnosis

In order to rapidly detect and analyze the presence of a target ligand of interests in environmental or industrial fluids as well as biological samples, numerous test systems have been designed and developed, which have been based on the combination of a test reagent and absorbing paper or membrane. The main limitations of these conventional devices are the difficulty of quantitative or semi-quantitative detection and poor detection limit (around nanogram/ml range detection capability). In this paper, new approaches and research trends which use nano/MEMS (micro electro mechanical systems) technology is introduced, which has a concept of fast, precise, and massive diagnosis and analysis of target molecules using very small amount of samples.