Ten Years Strong

Lab on a Chip (LOC) continues its march from strength to strength within the lab on a chip and microfluidics communities. No other journal supports the community to the same extent or reflects the rapidly changing nature of the subject as it expands and evolves. LOC supports a variety of prizes for young scientists at meetings throughout the year including: support for the GRC, the Widmer Award, The Art in Science Prize; and the LOC/Corning Inc Pioneers Prize (http://www.rsc.org/Publishing/Journals/lc/miniaturisation_prize_2010.asp). LOC also provides a variety of free services to authors and readers such as free colour in figures where appropriate, the Chips and Tips web feature (http://www.rsc.org/publishing/journals/lc/chips_and_tips/index.asp) offering tips and tricks, to newcomers, that are never included in published papers, we also have a LOC YouTube site (http://www.youtube.com/user/labonachipVideos) which we use to promote the work of our authors and encourage newcomers to the field. Recently we have also launched a FLIKR website (http://www.flickr.com/photos/labonachip) for the community to encourage and promote the artistic nature of microfluidic work.

We also publish the LOC Highlights section to keep LOC readers aware of developments published in other journals and for the last 18 months we have published a series of articles on commercialisation as discussed below. We hope that further developments in the pipeline for 2011 will also be of value to the community.

This year we celebrated the beginning of LOC's 10th anniversary (which will run into 2011 as our 10th birthday) with a variety of geographically focused issues on countries that played, or are playing, a leading role in the development of microfluidics: starting with Switzerland – the birthplace of modern microfluidics; to China; and Japan. Others still in the pipeline for 2011 are as follows: Korea, UK, Netherlands, France, Singapore and N. America. In some of these issues, we posed a variety of questions to authors asking their opinions on microfluidics and the future as well as questions about their own motivations. We hope you enjoy these celebratory issues and that they help inspire readers as well as potential newcomers to our field.

The uTAS conference is always LOC's most significant appointment on the calendar; this year was as successful as ever, culminating in the presentation of the LOC Widmer Award, the NIST/LOC Art in Science Award and the LOC/Corning Inc Pioneers Prize.

The Widmer Award winner was Katsuki Hirata from Osaka University, Japan Science and Technology Agency (JST). The Art in Science winner was Nicholas Gunn from the University of California, Irvine, USA and this years Pioneers Prize winner, Professor Stephen Quake (Stanford University, California, USA) is another truly outstanding candidate and well deserves the title of “pioneer”. See the inside back cover of this issue for more details.

Professor Quake also features in this issue of LOC as he introduces a new concept to microfluidics – biotic games (see DOI: 10.1039/c0lc00399a in this issue) – we hope this article will inspire readers to come forward with other ideas that may seem “outside the box” at the current time but could be potentially advantageous to other members of the community.

I would like to take this opportunity to say a grateful farewell to Professor Petra Dittrich who has done a fantastic job these last three years in researching and compiling the Highlights Section of LOC; she has always been spot-on with the research she has chosen to highlight from other sources for inclusion in LOC and her insight and timeliness of delivery will be very much missed.

If anyone else out there feels they can take on this role (there is a small honorarium) maybe as part of their journal club, I would be happy to consider your interest.

LOC will shortly also be saying goodbye to Dr Holger Becker, who has taught us so much over the last couple of years about commercialisation: the perils, the money, the training; and most of all the lack of knowledge most of us have when it comes to transitioning ideas and lab-based technologies to the real world. Although there is much still to learn about commercialisation, on the horizon there are several microfluidics instruments that will be commercial reality within the next 12 to 18 months from the likes of Samsung, Philips, Biocartis and others. Dr Becker completes his work for LOC at around Easter, but we have already recruited his replacement Professor Helene Andersson-Svahn (Nanobiotechnology Department at the Royal Institute of Technology in Sweden), who will focus on bio-related issues.

In 2011 LOC will also be publishing a series of articles we have named “Grand Challenges”. This name is used because we hope that in addition to being valuable scientific articles, editorials or reviews, this series will help to clearly outline/define at least a few of the outstanding challenges and problems in a variety of both core and adjacent technology areas where microfluidics has the potential to make a (significant) difference. We hope these articles prove to be valuable to readers and help the community to develop new ideas and potential new directions for research. The first in this series is a review that deals with currently available tools for HIV- related global health problems which will appear in issue 2 later this month.

Finally, I would like to thank all our Board Members, Authors, reviewers and readers for their continued support and efforts on behalf of the journal, it is you who make Lab on a Chip the success that it is. I hope that we will continue to be your premier publication for lab on a chip and microfluidics research for the foreseeable future.

Harp Minhas

Editor

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