BY SANDER GUSINOW WITH EACH TURN of the microscope, the tiny gray chip looked more and more like an M.C. Escher painting. What appeared as a tiny gray speck expanded like a kaleidoscope into hundreds of honeycomb-shaped grooves and nodes, capable of delivering an electric shock to a patient’s blood cells, one which separates cancerous and non-cancerous cells for study. Jose Luis Montoya Mira, a research engineer at Oregon Health & Science University’s Knight Cancer Institute, compared the process to un-blending a smoothie. “When you take all the blood from patients and you analyze it all together, the result is kind of like a mess, because you have all of these cells in the blood that are different,” Montoya Mira says. “When you drink a smoothie, you say, ‘Oh, this is sweet, it has blueberry and strawberry in it,’ but you can’t actually say, ‘This is blueberry, this is strawberry.’ What we can do is separate all the ingredients into completely separate compartments, and that gives you a more granular picture of what’s going on.” That capability is one example of microfluidics — an emerging field in which small amounts of fluid, often one quadrillionth of a liter, are placed onto a microchip through microscopic grooves, wells and channels. In health care, the technology allows for cellular ⁄Spotlight⁄ PHOTO BY JASON E. KAPLAN Oregon’s microfluidics Tech Hub joins academic and industry partners to help small fluids make a big leap. About the CHIPS and Science Act The Creating Helpful Incentives to Produce Semiconductors (CHIPS) and Science Act, was signed into law on August 9, 2022. The act directs $280 billion in spending over 10 years for scientific R&D and commercialization; semiconductor R&D, manufacturing and workforce development; tax credits for chip production and more. Its goal is to boost U.S. innovation, competitiveness and national security. Micro-Chasm Jose Luis Montoya Mira, a research engineer at Oregon Health & Science University’s Knight Cancer Institute 18
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