Malaga's future IMEC hub will develop platinum chips for DNA sequencing and brain 'neuropixels'

The future IMEC nanoelectronics hub in Malaga city will mainly work with biology, healthcare and life sciences. The chips this centre will prototype will facilitate DNA sequencing to monitor neuronal activy in the brain or to analyse a person's fluids with minute samples.

On Tuesday, CEO of IMEC Spain Karen van Gils highlighted how "microchips and artificial intelligence" are shaping the medicine of today. IMEC's work is essential in this field of research.

"One of the things we have been working on over the last few years is with US company PacBio. We have reduced the space needed to sequence the human genome from over 20 cubic metres to a chip of one cubic centimetre. With this, we have reduced the price from five million to one thousand dollars, which has made it affordable for a lot of research. This is the path that will lead us to personalised medicine," Van Gils said.

Another IMEC product is 'neuropixel': state-of-the-art high-density electrodes that allow the simultaneous recording of the electrical activity of hundreds of individual neurons.

"It is a research tool, not yet a clinical tool, but it is already used by more than 1,500 laboratories in the world," IMEC Spain's CEO said. The hub in Malaga will develop an "extremely small" photonic chip capable of collecting a lot of information from a person's bodily fluids.

"Leuven and Malaga will work as one integrated operation, with Malaga focusing on tasks that will complement what we do in Leuven. There will be possibilities here in Malaga that we don't have in Belgium and vice versa," Van Gils said.

Photonics for quantum computing is another very important area of research that might find an application in Malaga.