Recent advances in lab-on-a-chip for biosensing applications

The marriage of highly sensitive biosensor designs with the versatility in sample handling and fluidic manipulation offered by lab-on-a-chip systems promises to yield powerful tools for analytical and, in particular, diagnostic applications. The field where these two technologies meet is rapidly and almost violently developing. Yet, solutions where the full potentials are being exploited are still surprisingly rare. In the context of this review, sensor designs are often fairly advanced, whereas the lab-on-a-chip aspect is still rather simplistic in many cases, albeit already offering significant improvements to existing methods. Recent examples, showing a staggering variety of lab-on-a-chip systems for biosensing applications, are presented, tabularized for overview, and briefly discussed.