University of Alberta Professors Christopher Backhouse and Linda Pilarski, along with research student Govind Kaigala, said the device can provide significant savings for healthcare systems and improve care for patients. They said a wide variety of genetic tests that are available but not often used because their high cost, will become cheap, fast and easily accessible thanks to the use of micro- and nano-biotechnology.

Backhouse compares the development of the device that is about the size of a shoe box to the development of computers:

"In the early days of computers, they were inaccessible -- million-dollar beasts that filled a room and you needed a Ph.D. to be able to operate one," he said. "Nowadays, everybody has one and they're even in kindergarten classes. We've applied the same miniaturization technologies to healthcare that were applied to computers by coming up with portable, lab-on-a-chip technologies that are easy to use."

An article describing the creation of the technology appears in the Jan. 18 issue of the British journal The Analyst.