Small Times has a good article with interviews of researchers and industry leaders in the field of microfluidic chip development for biological science and biotechnology applications.

To illustrate the level of integration achieved with lab-on-a-chip, Knapp points to the Agilent 2100 Bioanalyzer. Using Caliper developed LabChip technology, the device measures out a specific quantity of protein sample, separates the protein mixture by size, stains the mixture with a fluorescent dye, and then de-stains the protein so that only the proteins are labeled. It then presents those results in a timed fashion to the optical detector. "You don't have to pour a gel. You don't have to load a gel. You don't have to stain or de-stain a gel. You don't have to scan the gel," he says. "All of those functions are integrated into the device."

The Microfluidic chip industry is going to produce successive generations of designs that are going to be progressively more complex, smaller, cheaper, and longer lasting. Just as microprocessors became useful for an increasingly large number of applications as they went thru this cycle so it shall be with microfluidics.

The microfluidics industry has developed more slowly than analysts had forecast.

Perhaps most unfortunate of all, microfluidics companies never were able to convince customers of the merits of the technology. What Frost & Sullivan predicted would be a $3.4 billion market by 2004 is just $175 million in 2003, according to the market research firm's analyst Nate Cosper.

But novel applications of microfluidics technology are being developed. For instance, a new prototype device will sort out the most viable sperm for use in in vitro fertilization.

University of Michigan researchers have developed prototype microfluidic devices that can automatically and rapidly sort sperm and isolate the most viable swimmers for injection into an egg. The Microscale Integrated Sperm Sorter does it all on one disposable device.

Many top university labs are working on microfluidics and more generally on what is called BioMEMs (where MEMS stands for MicroElectroMechanical Systems). For instance the Quake group at CalTech is working on "a DNA sequencing technology based on microfabricated flow channels and single molecule fluorescence detection". The promise of this technology is to allow faster and cheaper DNA sequencing using much smaller sample sizes.