A Lab on a Chip Could Save Your Life in an Emergency

Picture this: a hiker on a backcountry trail falls down a rocky embankment, and is left with a deep gash on the leg after the accident. By the time emergency rescue services arrive, the hiker has lost a considerable amount of blood and is going into shock. They are immediately airlifted to the nearest hospital. Upon arrival, the medical staff prepares for a blood transfusion. But first, they need to determine the patient’s blood type — a lab-based assay which can take half an hour or longer to yield results, which could easily spell the difference between life and death for the quickly deteriorating hiker.

Scientists at Japan’s Tokyo University of Science have created a potentially life-saving technology — a fully-automated lab on a chip that can identify a patient’s blood type reliably in under five minutes. This work, led by mechanical engineering experts Ken Yamamoto and Masahiro Motosuke was published in the journal Biomicrofluidics.

Blood typing is a classification based on either the presence or absence of specific molecules called antigens on the surface of red blood cells. These inherited antigenic molecules can consist of different combinations of proteins, glycoproteins, or carbohydrates. The most widely used blood grouping systems (ABO and Rh) denote a person’s blood type as either A, B, AB, or O, with a + or —…