UBC researchers are developing a new class of Canadian-made technology that shrinks an entire diagnostic laboratory onto a biosensor chip, a device small enough to operate in a clinic, a field backpack, or keep in a drawer at home.
Ask Dr. Karen Cheung, professor in UBC’s Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering and the School of Biomedical Engineering, what her lab is building, and she starts with a longstanding gap in women’s health that has helped motivate her research. “During perimenopause, hormone levels oscillate dramatically from day to day. Yet, a woman is treated based on a single blood test, a static data point in a dynamic biological system that may look entirely different a week later,” she explains.
40% of women report being misdiagnosed while seeking care during perimenopause, often treated for anxiety or depression rather than the hormonal shift underneath. A single measurement can be informative, but it is still only a snapshot. What's missing is the ability to see the pattern over time. That is the gap Dr. Cheung and her team are trying to address by developing compact, automated technology that can quantitatively track whole panels of hormones and metabolites over time. “For years, the fact that women’s hormones fluctuate was treated as a reason to leave them out of drug and clinical studies,” she says. “The opportunity is to measure those patterns over time alongside other information, such as how someone responds to a drug. That could reveal relationships we haven't had the data to see before,” says Dr. Cheung.
In her lab, that instinct—measure more, measure it precisely, measure it where people actually are—takes the shape of ultra-sensitive photonic biosensor development. Given that such ambition requires specialized expertise across disciplines, her team bridges surface chemistry through a powerful partnership with School of Biomedical Engineering professor Dr. Govind Kaigala and Electrical and Computer Engineering professors Dr. Sudip Shekhar and Dr. Lukas Chrostowski, co-founders of the UBC spin-off Dream Photonics.
An entire laboratory-on-a-chip
The clearest way to understand this platform is by looking at what it would replace. Currently, comparable benchmark systems are the size of large office printers, fitted with complex robotic arms, and cost upwards of $100,000 USD. They are restricted exclusively to stationary clinical settings.
Dr. Cheung’s team, alongside Dr. Kaigala, Dr. Shekhar and Dr. Chrostowski, is miniaturizing this core analytical capability onto a single silicon biophotonics chip: laboratory-grade diagnostics inside portable, inexpensive, rapid-testing cartridges.
“That is where the novelty lies,” says Dr. Shekhar, “not only in shrinking the instrument, but in reducing production costs. So, then instead of relying solely on centralized doctors’ offices or specialized laboratories, it can be used at home by women or by soldiers in the field, who can put it in their backpack, and use whenever they need to.” Mass production, like the Bluetooth chip in a phone that costs a couple of cents, makes a chip cheap in a way a delicate benchtop instrument can never be.
The same machine, a different question
Laboratory precision and rapid testing usually pull in opposite directions. A standard rapid test strip, like a home COVID test, offers a quick yes-or-no result but little quantitative detail and struggles to test for more than one target without signal interference. Cheung’s biosensor overcomes this by combining speed with precise, multi-target analysis. A single drop of saliva, urine, or blood is placed onto a silicon chip coated with custom protein binders. Paired with a laser and specialized electronics, the chip detects when specific molecules lock onto their matching binders. Instead of a basic color shift, it measures exact concentrations and binding strength. By housing multiple distinct binders on one chip, it performs several detailed tests at once to deliver a complete molecular signature from a single small sample.
The beauty is that none of this requires a different machine. “We change the chemistry on the surface,” as Dr. Cheung describes it, “and now it’s hormones. We change it, now it’s a brain-injury marker. We change it, now something else.” The engineering underneath stays the same; only the top layer is retuned.
Cheung’s group is using neurological biomarkers as one research context in which to develop and evaluate the biosensing platform. That work is at an early research stage and includes expertise from UBC’s Dr. Cheryl Wellington, a professor of pathology and laboratory medicine and a leading researcher on the biology of head trauma.
With Innovation UBC’s sponsored research team helping shepherd it forward, the project secured over $7.1 million from Pacific Economic Development Canada (PacifiCan) in February 2026 to develop a next-generation, field-deployable biosensing platform as Canada launched its first defense industrial strategy, providing new research funding for universities at the intersection of innovation and security. The PacifiCan investment provides the specialized infrastructure to expand the platform’s capabilities toward dual-use applications beyond women’s health. By changing the recognition chemistry on the chip, the same underlying technology can be investigated for very different classes of biomarkers, including those relevant to neurological injury. That is what sponsored research looks like when it is working: not a finished product on day one, but a partnership with the history, the funding, and the momentum to carry an idea from the bench toward the clinic and the field.
To learn how UBC researchers and industry partners are turning breakthrough research into real-world technology, visit innovation.ubc.ca.
