The Cyprus Research and Innovation Centre (CyRIC) has unveiled its product “MultiLab” – a first-of-its-kind lab-on-chip platform with sensors enabled.
These sensors (important in the fields of environmental monitoring and medical diagnostics) are small yet powerful, and can detect and provide a wide range of biochemical and chemical information.
While several conventional methods are still widely used in labs for microscopy and chromatography, also come with their set of limitations, namely being slower and requiring people technically qualified to use them.
MultiLab aims to tide over these problems by making intuitive sensors, which even a lay man can easily use.
Although led by CyRIC, MultiLab is now a section of the Horizon Europe Programme of the European Union.
It was officially launched on the 1st of January this year, and shall run for 4 years from now.
The CyRIC has a number for partners for this mission, which include several private companies and government-funded institutions from EU countries Germany, Spain, Austria, Belgium, Ireland, Greece, along with Switzerland.
The ultimate goal here is to manufacture the chip on a mass level, so that everyone who needs it can access it at an affordable rate.
For now, MultiLab has 2 major applications – finding early warning signs of harmful algae proliferations, and improving the diagnosis of unknown-origin fevers.
