Abstract
In recent years, point-of-care testing has played an important role in immunoassay, biochemical analysis, and molecular diagnosis, especially in low-resource settings. Among various point-of-care-testing platforms, microfluidic chips have many outstanding advantages. Microfluidic chip applies the technology of miniaturizing conventional laboratory which enables the whole biochemical process including reagent loading, reaction, separation, and detection on the microchip. As a result, microfluidic platform has become a hotspot of research in the fields of food safety, health care, and environmental monitoring in the past few decades. Here, the state-of-the-art application of microfluidics in immunoassay in the past decade will be reviewed. According to different driving forces of fluid, microfluidic platform is divided into two parts: passive manipulation and active manipulation. In passive manipulation, we focus on the capillary-driven microfluidics, while in active manipulation, we introduce pressure microfluidics, centrifugal microfluidics, electric microfluidics, optofluidics, magnetic microfluidics, and digital microfluidics. Additionally, within the introduction of each platform, innovation of the methods used and their corresponding performance improvement will be discussed. Ultimately, the shortcomings of different platforms and approaches for improvement will be proposed.
Highlights
In recent years, point-of-care testing has become a hot topic in scientific research, including research on immunoassay, biochemical analysis, and molecular diagnosis. e reason is that point-of-care-testing can achieve less reagent consumption and provide a strong guarantee for the early diagnosis of diseases
We focus on the capillary-driven microfluidics, while in active manipulation, we introduce pressure microfluidics, centrifugal microfluidics, electric microfluidics, optofluidics, magnetic microfluidics, and digital microfluidics
In 2020, an enhanced centrifugation-assisted lateral flow immunoassay for the point-of-care detection of prostate-specific antigen was conducted by Shen et al As shown in Figure 9(c), the whole operation steps of the experiment including sample preparation, flow actuation, and washing were automatically operated on the centrifugal platform with the combination of a nitrocellulose membrane inserted into the centrifugal microfluidic system and the integrated microfluidic device itself. e whole process was completed in 15 min with an limit of detection (LOD) of 0.028 ng/mL, which was 21.4-times of that of lateral flow immunoassay (LFIA) [42]
Summary
Point-of-care testing has become a hot topic in scientific research, including research on immunoassay, biochemical analysis, and molecular diagnosis. e reason is that point-of-care-testing can achieve less reagent consumption and provide a strong guarantee for the early diagnosis of diseases. Point-of-care testing has become a hot topic in scientific research, including research on immunoassay, biochemical analysis, and molecular diagnosis. Many scientific researchers have explored and studied the improvement of immunoassay performance when detecting analytes in blood or other secretory fluids. Tens of thousands of researchers have published their works on the application of microfluidics in immunoassay Among their attempt for improvement, some focus on the simplification of steps, some on the integration of systems, and some on the improvement of sensitivity. An ultra-low-cost paper centrifugal operating system that can be operated manually was invented in 2017 [6], and Tan et al developed a reusable optofluidic point-of-care testing platform for the sensitive detection of biomarkers with simple procedures [7]. The shortcomings of different platforms and approaches for improvement will be proposed
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