microfluidics

Researchers in Canada say they've built a device that will help them study changes in red blood cells caused by the most common species of malaria parasites, plasmodium falciparum, which causes the most lethal form of a disease that claims almost a million lives every year.

The microfluidic device, which is just 1 x 2 inches, is not a diagnostic tool but rather a way to test potential treatments--a crucial step in the fight against malaria, which is constantly evolving to develop resistance to drugs.

Typically, human red blood cells squeeze through capillaries that are narrower than the cells … Read more

Researchers from Harvard and MIT have designed a microfluidic device that uses porous "forests" of carbon nanotubes to detect individual cancer cells or viruses such as HIV in a blood sample.

Harvard's Mehmet Toner, MIT's Brian Wardle and colleagues improved upon a device developed four years ago that had forests of silicon posts to detect target cells.

By making the posts out of porous carbon nanotubes, which are cylinders of carbon atoms, and attaching various antibodies to them, sample fluid can flow through and around the "trees," increasing the chances of detection.

The antibodies will bond to targets chemically, but the device also works mechanically by trapping particles depending on the distance between the trees. The forest has 10 billion to 100 billion carbon nanotubes per square centimeter, and is 99 percent air. … Read more

Cell phones with sophisticated cameras are already being fitted with microscopes for mobile, in-the-field testing. Connecting microfluids to these cell phones, however, has proved to be its own challenge.

So biomedical engineers at UC Davis have developed what they call a Fit-to-Flow fluid connector (F2F for short) they compare to the USB interface, through which microfluids can be connected to electronic devices for biological and chemical testing.

They filed a provisional patent on November 1 and published a paper describing the chip on November 25 in the journal Lab on a Chip.

"We think there is a huge need … Read more

Microchip technology can now enable chemists to perform more than 1,000 experiments at once, according to researchers from the University of California at Los Angeles.

A team of scientists from the university and other organizations have developed a chip based on microfluidics--the channeling of minute amounts of liquids and chemicals. The chip is designed to be plugged into a computer so chemists can perform multiple chemical reactions on the chip automatically.

In a study, the UCLA scientists produced a chip capable of conducting 1,024 reactions simultaneously, which the scientists used to identify inhibitors to the enzyme bovine carbonic … Read more

Researchers have come up with a microscopic microscope, tiny enough to fit on a fingertip, that can be cheaply mass-produced and used to scan blood and water for pathogens.

The high-resolution microscope functions without the large and expensive lenses usually associated with such imaging devices. Instead, it combines the chip technology found in digital cameras with "microfluidics," the science of channeling liquid at scales far smaller than a common droplet.

"The whole thing is truly compact--it could be put in a cell phone--and it can use just sunlight for illumination, which makes it very appealing for third-world applications," said Changhuei Yang, an assistant professor of electrical engineering and bioengineering at the California Institute of Technology and one of the lead developers of the device.

Yang imagines a range of uses for the so-called optofluidic microscope, which measures about the size of George Washington's nose on a quarter and has the magnifying power of a top-quality optical microscope, according to the Caltech research team.

Health field workers could use it to examine blood samples for malaria and check water for giardia and other parasites. It could be employed on the battlefield. Yang said the microscope could one day even be implanted inside humans to isolate rogue cancer cells circulating in the bloodstream.

"Our research is motivated by the fact that microscopes have been around since the 16th century, and yet their basic design has undergone very little change and has proven prohibitively expensive to miniaturize," said Yang, who is currently in talks with biotech companies about mass-producing the chip, a process he says costs about $10 per microscope. … Read more