The aging population and steadily increasing costs of medical care pose great challenges to the health care systems of industrial nations. To improve health care over the long-term and reduce costs, new methods for the early detection of diseases and individual, effective therapies are required. With this overarching goal in mind, 32 partners from eight European countries are developing an innovative, cost-efficient analysis platform for in vitro diagnosis. The collaboration forms part of the ENIAC project “Chip Architectures by Joint Associated Labs for European Diagnostics” (CAJAL4EU). Specific aims include:

• Developing and optimizing innovative biosensors based on semiconductor chips.
• Developing microfluidic lab-on-a-chip systems for specimen collection and handling.
• Integrating the sensors into the lab-on-a-chip environment.

Fraunhofer IZM is coordinating the project and developing microsystem technologies for integrating the process control and diagnosis components into a point-of-care platform

*Funded by BMBF