South Korean research team has developed bio and chemical material analytical technology that can reduce consumption of reagent by hundred fold. It is expected that this technology will improve efficiency in detecting virus, diagnosing, illness, and developing new medicine.
Pohang University of Science & Technology (POSTECH) announced on the 20th that a research team led by Professor Kim Joon-won has developed fundamental technology called ‘micro-fluid-based next-generation microarray platform’ that improves efficiency in analyzing bio and chemical materials’ reactions by controlling micro-particles.
Microarray has hundreds to tens of thousands of areas arranged as a tile in order to analyze many tests.
Previously microarray was not able to completely separate each reaction when it analyzed mixed reactions of a material from single analytical chip. It was difficult to analyze multiple reactions at the same time due to contamination between materials.
Research team utilized a principle where water and oil does not mix together and created many independent spaces that include microcapsule structure within analytical chips. By placing variety of particles within each space, microarray is then able to analyze many reactions at the same time without mutual contamination.

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<Most current Advanced Materials issue that chose result of Professor Kim Joon-won’s research as the cover page>

This technology reduces consumption of reagent by hundred fold and also reduces reaction time by hundred fold. Research team is planning to increase number of micro-particles that can be arranged in its follow-up research and also diversify functions. It is going to work on implementing multi-analysis that cannot be performed as of now.
“This is a fundamental technology that can simply carry out analysis of mixed reactions of many materials from single chip.” said Professor Kim Joon-won. “It can dramatically reduce time that is required to diagnose highly pathogenic illnesses and to develop new and generic medicines and amount of expensive reagent.”
Result of this research was chosen as the cover page of the current ‘Advanced Materials’ issue. This research was carried out through support from Ministry of Science and ICT’s Global Frontier Project (Bio-Nano Health Guard Research Group), Leading Research Center Project, and Ministry of Health & Welfare’s Research-Centered Hospital Promotion Project.
Staff Reporter Song, Junyoung | songjy@etnews.com