1 hr.

John Roach

Stephen Quake, a prolific inventor whose application of physics to biology has led to breakthroughs in drug discovery, genome analysis and personalized medicine, has won the $500,000 Lemelson-MIT Prize, a prestigious award for outstanding innovators.

A big part of physics is trying to figure out how to measure things, Quake, who is a professor of bioengineering and applied physics at Stanford University, told me. And so I get interested in a biological problem [and] figure out a way to measure it.

Among his many inventions is the biological equivalent of the integrated circuit, so-called microfluidic large scale integration.

I got interested in trying to automate biology the way the integrated circuit automated computation, he said. And so you need a chip that, instead of having wires and transistors on it, has pipes and valves and pumps and things.

It is little miniaturized plumbing. Its got up to tens of thousands of mechanical valves on a chip, and all kinds of plumbers nightmares.

Quake co-founded Fluidigm to commercialize the technology in 1999. The company generated $10.8 million in sales in the first quarter of 2012, Reuters noted.

Applications of the technology are myriad, including Quakes own work on single-cell genomics. Others have used it to help determine the structure of proteins, including for the Ebola virus and H5N1 influenza virus, for example.

Another Quake innovation is a non-invasive pre-natal test for Down syndrome which is based on analysis of blood taken from a mothers arm, which includes fetal DNA.

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Inventor of plumbing on a chip wins $500,000 prize