The same technology that brings us computer chips and electronics is also used to improve prescription drugs. Scientists use microfabrication to shrink laboratory experiments and tests onto chips as small as a ladybug. These so-called labs-on-chips are tiny, but they have big implications for the future of medicine.

Computer chips are made by taking a silicon wafer, etching channels for microcircuitry, and coating it with metal to form wires. Successive steps of removing old material and then adding new can make a very complicated circuit. Etching and adding can also be used to make tiny chambers for cells and tiny tubes to add test chemicals. In this way, we can use a microchip both as an electrical device and as an environment for medical testing. Combining electricity, biology, and low cost means that doctors and scientists can perform difficult and expensive electrobiological tests with ease.

A great example of a lab on a chip is the chip-based patch clamp. Before microchip technology, the patch clamp was a wired syringe with an opening small enough to capture just a patch of the cell’s membrane. When a scientist put current through the syringe, she could figure out whether the cell’s membrane was resisting electricity. This helped her to figure out whether the cell was allowing certain chemicals, like calcium ions, to pass through its membrane. Calcium flow issues cause heart problems—this is why the painkiller Vioxx was recalled.

If the cell was immersed in a drug that made calcium pass abnormally, the scientist would find out without endangering patients. But syringe patch clamps are slow—it takes a scientist hours to catch a single cell on the syringe. By contrast, chip-based patch clamps can capture and test 20 cells at once.

By borrowing manufacturing techniques from the computer industry, scientists and doctors are making experiments faster and cheaper—and thus making medicine faster and cheaper for everyone.