When it was announced last year that CU-Boulder had been awarded $1.7 million from the National Institute of Infectious Diseases to develop a "Flu Chip" to help diagnose respiratory illness, phones began ringing.

"There were a flurry of calls," said Kathy Rowlen, principal investigator on the award and a chemistry and biochemistry professor. "Everyone wanted to know when the chips would be available."

	Top: Kathy Rowlen discusses the quality of a Flu Chip with graduate student James Smagala. Middle: Undergraduate Amy Reppert examines the results from a hybridization study. Bottom: Pipetting a sample.

No wonder. Influenza causes an estimated 500,000 deaths worldwide each year and countless other hardships. The 1918-19 Spanish Flu pandemic killed 20-40 million people in less than a year and infected roughly one-fifth of the world's population.

The Flu Chip should allow medical practitioners to swiftly differentiate types of influenza carried by infected people - perhaps within an hour - using a hand-held device about the size of a cell phone.

The team uses a robot to help build the Flu Chip. The process is relatively simple: the robot picks and places scores of different, nanoscopic-sized genetic "bits" from known influenza strains onto a three-inch-square slide known as a microarray. Then the microarray is immersed in a wash of gene fragments gleaned from fluid obtained from an infected person.

Finally, the portions that bind to specific genetic segments on the microarray (much like a key in a lock) are considered a match, indicating that a specific virus is present. Such "hits" light up like a pinball machine when the chip is inserted into a laser scanner, having previously been treated with a fluorescent dye.

It's not easy to build the Flu Chip. Its development - which also involves Associate Professor Robert Kuchta and several students in collaboration with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the World Health Organization, and Bio-Rad Laboratories - is expected to take up to two years.

"One of our goals is to provide a rapid and inexpensive new tool for the global screening of respiratory illness," Rowlen said.