Bio-MEMS: Design, Fabrication, Characterizations

Abstract

In recent years, Point-of-care-testing (POCT) has played an increasingly important role in healthcare management in human daily life, especially in remote areas with limited resources. Currently, most traditional analytical devices used for medical are expensive, bulky and require professional operations, which largely limits their use in POCT. However, the microfluidic chip, which integrates the whole biochemical process including reagent loading, reaction, separation and detection, can effectively solve this problem. Therefore, microfluidic chip has been widely studied in the fields of food, environment and medical monitoring. In this paper, the recent advances in immunoassay, biochemical analysis and molecular diagnosis of microfluidic platform are reviewed. In the immunoassay, the latest applications of different types of microfluidic platforms including capillary, gravity, centrifugal, magnetic, digital and optical microfluidic systems were summarized. In biochemical analysis, the research on plasma separation, biological particle extraction and quantitative detection of biochemical substances in the centrifugal microfluidic system was emphasized. In the aspect of molecular diagnosis, the research progress of polymerase chain reaction (PCR), loop mediated isothermal amplification (LAMP) and recombinant polymerase amplification (RPA) were reviewed.