At the Engineering in Medicine and Biology Conference in Buenos Aires, Argentina, the Interuniversity Microelectronics Centre (IMEC) and its project partners announced the launch of the European Seventh Framework Project, MIRACLE. The MIRACLE project aims at developing an operational lab-on-a-chip for the isolation and detection of circulating and disseminated tumor cells (CTCs and DTCs) in blood. The new lab-on-a- chip is an essential step toward faster and cost-efficient diagnosis of cancer.

In a preceding joint project by some of the partners (MASCOT FP6-027652), individual microfluidic modules for cell isolation, cell counting, DNA amplification, and detection have been developed. Based on this expertise and strengthened by additional partners, the development of a fully automated, lab-on-a-chip platform to isolate, count, and genotype CTCs is envisaged within the framework of the MIRACLE project. For genotyping, genetic material (i.e., mRNA) will be extracted from the cells and multiple cancer-related markers will be amplified based on multiplex ligation dependent probe amplification, followed by their detection using an array of electrochemical sensors. Full integration of all steps requires innovative research and processing steps that need a combination of the multidisciplinary and unique expertise of the different project partners (ranging from microfluidics to interfacing, miniaturization, and integration skills).

Within the framework of the MIRACLE project, IMEC as project coordinator will collaborate with the Universitat Rovira I Virgili (Spain), the Institut für Mikrotechnik Mainz, AdnaGen, ThinXXs, and Consultech (Germany), MRC Holland (The Netherlands), the Oslo University Hospital (Norway), the KTH Royal Institute of Technology, Multi-D, and Fujirebio Diagnostics (Sweden), ECCO (the European Cancer Organization) and ICsense (Belgium), and Labman (UK). The project aims at developing a fully automated and integrated microsystem providing the genotype of CTCs and DTCs starting from clinical samples. MIRACLE is partly funded by the European Commission (FP7-ICT-2009.3.9).