Oliver J. Chiang, Forbes.com
Michelle Khine is the ‘MacGyver’ of bioengineering. Kline has invented a quick-and-dirty way to manufacture medical diagnostic chips, usually a costly and laborious procedure. But where the scrappy ’80s TV show character had his trusty Swiss army knife, Khine has Shrinky Dinks. That’s right:–the plastic sheet that shrinks to approximately one-third its original size when baked in a household oven and is more typically used by kids for making key chains and other knickknacks.
Specifically, Khine used Shrinky Dinks to make microfluidic chips, whose dimensions are measured in millimeters. Widely known as “labs on a chip,” microfluidic chips allow scientists and doctors to run experiments and diagnostic tests– for conditions like cancer and infectious diseases–cheaply and portably. Creating these chips, however, is very expensive, requiring equipment that costs anywhere from hundreds of thousands to millions of dollars. Production used to take days and required a perfectly sterile environment.In 2006, Khine, then an assistant professor at UC Merced, wanted to run some experiments using custom microfluidic chips, but she didn’t have the money to make them. Recalling her favorite
childhood toy, she improvised.
Khine took a Shrinky Dink sheet, used a laser printer to print a pattern on it and baked it in a toaster oven. The ink particles on the shrunken sheet bunched together to form ridges–effectively creating a mold upon which Khine poured a plastic polymer. And presto-shrinko: The researcher had discovered a way to make microfluidic chips in minutes at a cost of a few dollars per chip.
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