Impact of microfluidic systems for molecular and genomic analysis: technological and socio-economic perspectives

The last few years witnessed a remarkable development of microsystems for the life sciences. In particular, molecular and genomic analysis techniques underwent a tremendous development. After a focused review on these fields, it will be shown that most of the solutions proposed primarily aim at a higher level of automation for saving costs and time, while reducing the errors that may occur with manual methods. Some socio-economic considerations are also provided to sketch the potential market of such novel devices and a patent overview is presented. A future scenario, enabled by microtechnologies, is eventually provided.

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