Biochips: Technologies and applications

Progresses in the life sciences during the last decades have been characterized by a continuous improvement in the resolution power of the investigation techniques, allowing a top-down approach, from whole organisms, far beyond the cellular size, down to the single molecule or even the single atom. This ability to characterize biological structures and dynamic processes in real-time at the nanometric level, offers an extremely powerful tool for the comprehension of the elementary phenomena occurring in the single cell. Genomics, Proteomics and Channelomics are young disciplines coping with DNA sequencing, gene expression, immunology, regulation of cell activity and intracellular communication. Although biochips are frequently associated only with DNA-chips, there is a variety of biological and biochemical elements that can be interfaced; as an example whole cells, cell populations or even tissue slices can be investigated on a microelectrodes array (MEA), making it possible, passing to a bottom-up method, to better understand the behaviour of cellular ensembles of increasing complexity. MEA technologies have also delivered fundamental contribution to the development of new implantable prosthetic devices. Thus biochips can be considered more in general as structured and functionalized bio/non-bio interfaces. Inside this scenario, the most relevant application is the screening of new drugs, which is required and regulated by law, to reliably evaluate benefits and risks of pharmaceutical compounds