Domestic medical team develops DNA chip to diagnose serious illnesses

A domestic medical team has successfully developed a DNA chip to diagnose serious illnesses such as cancer just with a drop of blood.

The team consisted of seven medical experts, including Choi Young-Kil, director of Kyunghee Medical Center; Prof. Han In-Kwon of the internal medicine department at Sungkyunkwan University's Samsung Medical Center; and Prof. Kim Bom-Saeng of the neurology department at Catholic Medical Center in Yoido.

The team announced Thursday that it had succeeded in developing and commercializing the Oligo DNA chip to detect five cancers such as breast, ovarian, prostate, colon and lung, and six chronic illnesses such as diabetes, hypertension, osteoporosis, senile dementia and obesity.

The DNA chip was designed to attach scores or hundreds of chromosomes on a glass slide and detect illnesses in just a few minutes by dropping blood on them and examining their chemical responses.

Prof. Han said that in diagnosing a disease, doctors have to examine thousands of chromosomes. It takes about three months before patients are given the results. The procedure takes a month in the United States and three months in Japan.

There are four kinds of chips and the diagnosis fee is 400,000 won to 1.5 million won, one fourth that charged for the use of foreign chips.

Some American medical firms also developed bio-DNA chips, but as the fees are so high and the analysis technology so difficult, they have not been used worldwide.

Prof. Han said that the global market for the chip is worth about 10 trillion won and his team will export it through a bio-venture company.