Biochip innovation by DEEE students

11 Apr 2016

Two final year DEEE students, Pavan Singh Gill, 19 and Leong Guang Hao, 19, developed an advanced biochip, which can potentially speed up the separation of cells for the detection of viruses such as HIV, Ebola, and SAR. The project was a collaboration between Singapore Institute of Manufacturing Technology (SIMTech) and SP Centre for Biomedical and Life Sciences. The biochip holds promise of cutting down time and cost of separating cells for testing and identifying a virus. It allows blood to be simply pumped through a spiral in the chip and cells to be separated by their sizes rather than, right now, using complicated and large machines to do so. The design of the biochip, now in its prototyping stage, will require further optimisation. The biochip was among the 10 projects that received the best project award at the joint Poly Student Research Programme Award ceremony held on 16 March 2016.