Abstract
The shortcomings of standard plasma-separation methods limit the point-of-care application of microfluidics in clinical facilities and at the patient’s bedside. To overcome the limitations of this inconvenient, laborious, and costly technique, a new plasma-separation technique and device were developed. This new separation method relies on immunological capture and filtration to exclude cells from plasma, and is convenient, easy to use, and cost-effective. Most of the RBCs can be captured and immobilized by antibody which coated in separation matrix, and residue cells can be totally removed from the sample by a commercially plasma purification membranes. A 400 µL anti-coagulated whole blood sample with 65% hematocrit (Hct) can be separated by the device in 5 min with only one pipette. Up to 97% of the plasma can be recovered from the raw blood sample with a separation efficiency at 100%. The recovery rate of small molecule compounds, proteins, and nucleic acid biomarkers is evaluated; there are no obvious differences from the centrifuge method. The results demonstrate that this method is an excellent replacement for traditional plasma preparation protocols.
Highlights
Microfluidics, the manipulation of reagents and samples on microchips, is a new strategy to improve existing methods and offer new approaches for analysis
A passive separation technique based on the Zweifach–Fung effect has been developed to separate plasma from whole blood samples using specially designed microchannels [3,6,7,8,9,10,11]
We have successfully developed a modular universal plasma-separation microdevice based on immunocapture and size filtering. This device was used in this study to separate 400 μL of whole blood sample to produce more than 100 μL of plasma without residue cells, but the separation capacity can be adjusted to fulfill different testing requirements
Summary
Microfluidics, the manipulation of reagents and samples on microchips, is a new strategy to improve existing methods and offer new approaches for analysis. Microfluidics techniques based point-of-care testing are successfully used for chronic disease management and on-site analysis, such as glucose testing, uric acid testing, pregnancy testing, and infection disease detection [1,2]. Much effort has been made to extend the clinical applications of these techniques by developing integrable and easy-to-use sample preparation modules, e.g., for plasma preparation. Active and passive separation are two major types of microfluidics-based plasma preparation [3,4]. A passive separation technique based on the Zweifach–Fung effect has been developed to separate plasma from whole blood samples using specially designed microchannels [3,6,7,8,9,10,11]. The most common approach used in the past few years is passive filtration by pillar array [12,13,14,15,16,17,18,19,20,21] or implanted filtration membrane [22,23,24,25,26]
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