With a large focus of lab-on-a-chip devices used to detect bacteria, viruses, and other pathogens that are currently making a patient ill, what about the detection of pathogens or antibodies that are triggers for future illness? A small, but just as important, focus is the tracking of autoantibodies in patients to predict whether certain autoimmune diseases, such as multiple sclerosis, type 1 diabetes and rheumatoid arthritis, can eventually develop. Autoimmune diseases result from antibodies that begin attacking specific regions of the body and immune system, called autoantibodies. Often these diseases can take years before the damages done by these antibodies are seen. In the March issue of Scientific American, the article "New Predictors of Disease” proposes the tracking of these autoantibodies as a form of preventative therapy and eventually developing an on-chip kit to track the progress of these antibodies. They have found that the autoantibodies may be found up to 10 years prior to any symptoms and may act as a predictor for some of these diseases. However, the pathway of the autoantibodies is different in each disease, creating difficulties in blocking and treating these miscreant antibodies. Thus, a large step in developing this type of prevention diagnosis lies with understanding how these autoantibodies attack and promote the rate of onset of these diseases. The vision of this article suggests that on-chip screening could allow for these trigger proteins and antibodies to be detected without laboratory analysis. Looking at the current research for blood diagnostic kits, other than glucose detection, there has been little progress in a fully integrated, rapid detection method for the presence of pathogens. One of the hurdles with blood diagnostics is the separation of the plasma from the red blood cells and the white blood cells since whole blood is 40% red blood cells, with a small percentage of that being the vital white blood cells. With no method other than centrifugation to separate them, it is difficult to develop an on-chip sensor for these antibodies. I believe creating a rapid on-chip detection kit for these predictive antibodies will play a large part in the diagnostic industry in the next few years.