3D printing direct to industrial roll-to-roll casting for fast prototyping of scalable microfluidic systems.

Amber L Boutiette,Bailey Corless,Cristoffer Toothaker,Chouaib Boukaftane,Caitlin Howell,Ivan Kryven

doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0244324

Abstract

Microfluidic technologies have enormous potential to offer breakthrough solutions across a wide range of applications. However, the rate of scale-up and commercialization of these technologies has lagged significantly behind promising breakthrough developments in the lab, due at least in part to the problems presented by transitioning from benchtop fabrication methods to mass-manufacturing. In this work, we develop and validate a method to create functional microfluidic prototype devices using 3D printed masters in an industrial-scale roll-to-roll continuous casting process. There were no significant difference in mixing performance between the roll-to-roll cast devices and the PDMS controls in fluidic mixing tests. Furthermore, the casting process provided information on the suitability of the prototype microfluidic patterns for scale-up. This work represents an important step in the realization of high-volume prototyping and manufacturing of microfluidic patterns for use across a broad range of applications.

Highlights

Some of the most high-impact future markets for the development of microfluidic technology are those that will require high-volume production, such as microfluidic point-of-care (POC) diagnostics which could facilitate decentralized testing of patients and faster time-to-result in coordinated responses to outbreaks of disease [1] or the move toward personalized medicine [2,3,4]
There is a striking and widely recognized disconnect between the number of microfluidic applications being developed in academic labs and the number of microfluidic technologies being translated to the market [3, 6,7,8,9,10]
The major factors holding back microfluidic technology commercialization are a lack of standardization of components and the difficulty of scaling-up the fabrication approaches most widely used in academic research labs [5, 7, 11, 12]

Summary

Introduction

Some of the most high-impact future markets for the development of microfluidic technology are those that will require high-volume production, such as microfluidic point-of-care (POC) diagnostics which could facilitate decentralized testing of patients and faster time-to-result in coordinated responses to outbreaks of disease [1] or the move toward personalized medicine [2,3,4]. There is a striking and widely recognized disconnect between the number of microfluidic applications being developed in academic labs and the number of microfluidic technologies being translated to the market [3, 6,7,8,9,10]. The major factors holding back microfluidic technology commercialization are a lack of standardization of components and the difficulty of scaling-up the fabrication approaches most widely used in academic research labs [5, 7, 11, 12]. The use of fabrication techniques such as soft lithography [13,14,15], or etching [16] followed by casting into polydimethylsiloxane (PDMS) [17], is broadly used in academia [10], but often results in relatively few replicates of a custom microfluidic design which cannot provide the statistical rigor necessary to justify commercial.

Methods

Results

Conclusion