Abstract
Increased demand for inexpensive and rapid prototyping methods for micro- and millifluidic lab-on-a-chip (LOC) devices has stimulated considerable interest in alternative cost-effective fabrication techniques. Additive manufacturing (AM)—also called three-dimensional (3D) printing—provides an attractive alternative to conventional fabrication techniques. AM has been used to produce LOC master moulds from which positive replicas are made using soft-lithography and a biocompatible elastomer, poly(dimethylsiloxane) (PDMS). Here we characterize moulds made using two AM methods—stereolithography (SLA) and material-jetting (MJ)—and the positive replicas produced by soft lithography and PDMS moulding. The results showed that SLA, more than MJ, produced finer part resolution and finer tuning of feature geometry. Furthermore, as assessed by zebrafish (Danio rerio) biotoxicity tests, there was no toxicity observed in SLA and MJ moulded PDMS replicas. We conclude that SLA, utilizing commercially available printers and resins, combined with PDMS soft-lithography, is a simple and easily accessible technique that lends its self particularly well to the fabrication of biocompatible millifluidic devices, highly suited to the in-situ analysis of small model organisms.
Highlights
Lab-on-a-chip (LOC) devices permit the manipulation of extremely small volumes of fluids and regents within networks of miniaturized channels, and are being readily adopted in the fields of biomedical and ecological testing [1,2,3,4,5,6,7]
The results found by Zhu et al [9], and similar studies conducted by Oskui et al [21], Alifui-Segbaya [22], and Macdonald et al [17], were unexpected because some of the materials tested (e.g., VisiJet SL Clear) have been awarded a United States Pharmacopoeia (USP) Class VI certification [23]
Samples were coated with Au/Pd using an in-house sputter coater operating at 15 mA for 2 min [9]
Summary
Lab-on-a-chip (LOC) devices permit the manipulation of extremely small volumes of fluids and regents within networks of miniaturized channels, and are being readily adopted in the fields of biomedical and ecological testing [1,2,3,4,5,6,7]. The main motivation of our work was to demonstrate an and widely accessible user-friendly and inexpensive fabrication method using “off-the-shelf” resins and commercially available AM printers to produce biocompatible millifluidic systems for application in bioengineering, biomedical and toxicological fields, and for use in laboratories that may or may not have direct access to AM facilities. This method utilizes standard technology and materials and requires minimum infrastructure investments, reducing the entry barrier to this technology when compared to conventional techniques. We characterize both the moulds and PDMS replicas, and assess the toxicity of PDMS replicas by using zebrafish (Danio rerio) toxicity tests
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