A biotechnology firm aims to bring handheld testing devices for harmful bacteria and viruses to hospi-tals, schools, farms and even homes within 18 months by pairing up with local personal-digital assistant (PDA) manufacturers, company officials said yesterday.
"We are co-operating with local PDA companies and hope to have a handheld testing laboratory on the market within one and a half years," Mike Chen (
"Eventually each test will take less than one hour," he said.
Dr Chip claims to have pioneered biochips or polymer chips that react on a molecular level to harmful agents present in a sample taken from a suspect source such as a throat swab, a drop of liquid, a smear from an animal and display genetic markers from potential killers in the form of colored dots.
Separate pathogens show up as different patterns of colored dots which are then read by a scanner to identify exactly what they are. With this information, doctors can offer patients the right treatment.
"The beauty of biochips is that you can detect multiple targets in one test," said Dr Chip's international marketing director, Esther Wu (
"The idea is that by putting an entire lab on one chip you avoid labor and human error," she said.
"We are focusing on automation so people can use the chip system at home," she added. "That's our final goal."
There are many potential uses for Dr Chip's diagnostic tests. One kit the company sells already detects the deadly white spot virus that can wipe out a shrimp farm in two days from the first infection.
Another detects the unpleasant enterovirus that causes diarrhea and stomach pains and can be fatal in children.
The company sold over 10,000 enterovirus test kits last year to hospitals and institutions in Taiwan to protect children in schools where the virus is prevalent.
Around 5,400 tests were sold to the Dairy Development Association of China to detect diseases in cattle like mastitis, which affects milk production.
The US dairy industry loses US$1.7 billion in milk production to mastitis annually, according to the National Mastitis Council.
The process currently takes four to six hours, and can identify 67 types of enterovirus, nine types of food-borne pathogen including e-coli, listeria and staphylococcus, eight types of harmful milk bacteria and respiratory viruses like influenza A and B, chlamydia and, most recently, SARS.
Dr Chip has yet to make a breakthrough with its SARS test, however, as the government has not certified its production procedure. For any test that is administered on humans, the government requires a Good Manufacturing Practice (GMP) certificate.
By moving into a new building in the Chunan Science Park (竹南科學園區) -- an overspill of the now fully occupied Hsinchu Science-Based Industrial Park -- and setting up a new manufacturing facility, the company expects to achieve GMP status by year-end, Chen said.
But there are markets outside the country. Beijing's Center for Disease Control and several hospitals in China have purchased SARS detection kits in anticipation of a new outbreak of the disease this winter, Wu said.
Dr Chip was founded by Wang Hsien-huang (王獻煌), formerly the project leader of the biochip technology development program at the Industrial Technology Research Institute (工研院), an academic institute that incubates research into viable companies.
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