Implementation of DNA chips obtained by microprojection for diagnostic and personalized medicine.

It is expected that rapidly emergent new fields of application for DNA chips will be Diagnostic and Personalized Medicine. These new applications will require a limited number of probes, generally from 100 to 1000. So, after a brief review of the existing techniques to manufacture DNA chips, which are efficient for R&D applications and which often require a higher number of probes, we shall first report some advances in the silanization of the substrates and the grafting of probes to improve the robustness and the reliability of the devices. Then we shall discuss two manufacturing processes working at the scale of a nanoliter of reactant: ex situ and in situ fabrication by microprojection. We shall see how these processes are complementary and may be used to design and produce chips, at a large scale, for these new applications.