Tiny wires might help detect cancer

STATE COLLEGE, Pa., March 11 (UPI) -- U.S. scientists have created a bottom-up manufacturing technique that might lead to tiny medical devices capable of detecting viruses or cancer markers.

"Diagnostic chips can be made more useful by assembling, at predetermined locations on the chip, large numbers of nanowires pretreated off chip," said Penn State Assistant Research Professor Rustom Bhiladvala. "Using this new bottom-up method, our group has demonstrated that thousands of single wires can be successfully aligned and anchored to form tiny diving board resonator arrays."

The traditional top-down process begins with silicon and carves nanoresonator devices from the material, Bhiladvala said. That approach works well and produces many devices that are nearly identical.

The bottom-up method, although not producing identical devices, is more flexible, he said. In bottom-up fabrication, researchers manufacture nanowires off chip using any inorganic or organic material that will produce nanowires. They can attach probe molecules to the wires off chip, using a variety of chemicals and then attach each group of nanowires and their probes to the chips in the numbers and at the locations desired, the scientists said.