The IEEE hosted the Tech Insider: From Labs-on-Chips to Cellular Machines: Interfacing Engineering and Biology at the Micro and Nanoscale webinar today. Professor Bashir from the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign provided a very interesting presentation on architectures for labs-on-chips to address three grand challenges. These include:

1. HIV/AID detection
2. Diagnostics for cancer detection via miRNA
3. Engineering of biological systems

Then Mark Winter from the X Prize Foundation describe the initiatives that the foundation is working on to promote point of use healthcare devices. The first is the Qualcom Tricorder X Prize and Nokia Sensing X Challenge which involve $10M and $2.5M in prizes respectively. The webinar should be on archive within a week.