Abstract
Microfluidics technology has not impacted the delivery and accessibility of point-of-care health services, like diagnosing infectious disease, monitoring health or delivering interventions. Most microfluidics prototypes in academic research are not easy to scale-up with industrial-scale fabrication techniques and cannot be operated without complex manipulations of supporting equipment and additives, such as labels or reagents. We propose a label- and reagent-free inertial spiral microfluidic device to separate red blood, white blood and dendritic cells from blood fluid, for applications in health monitoring and immunotherapy. We demonstrate that using larger channel widths, in the range of 200 to 600 µm, allows separation of cells into multiple focused streams, according to different size ranges, and we utilize a novel technique to collect the closely separated focused cell streams, without constricting the channel. Our contribution is a method to adapt spiral inertial microfluidic designs to separate more than two cell types in the same device, which is robust against clogging, simple to operate and suitable for fabrication and deployment in resource-limited populations. When tested on actual human blood cells, 77% of dendritic cells were separated and 80% of cells remained viable after our assay.
Highlights
Throughout the 30-year development history of microfluidics technologies [1], a broad array of inventive concepts, novel physics and prototype devices have been demonstrated which miniaturize fluidic manipulation to achieve large-scale simultaneous assays with nanoliter reactions and precise manipulation and inspection of microscopic objects [2]
A prototype of the device is shown in Figure 1a, which includes Scanning Electron Microscope (SEM) images of the planar and cross-sectional profiles
We found that the majority of red blood cells are between 6 and 7 μm; white blood cells are between 8 and 11 μm; and dendritic cells are between 13 and 15 μm
Summary
Throughout the 30-year development history of microfluidics technologies [1], a broad array of inventive concepts, novel physics and prototype devices have been demonstrated which miniaturize fluidic manipulation to achieve large-scale simultaneous assays with nanoliter reactions and precise manipulation and inspection of microscopic objects [2]. While microfluidics technology has emerged as a powerful laboratory tool for academic research, there is an absence of its mass adoption toward solving compelling commercial or communal problems. Microfluidics technology has a pressing opportunity to enable point-of-care (POC) testing of infectious diseases and improve healthcare services and patient outcomes in places with limited laboratory infrastructure. POC devices may enable novel ways to monitor population health and improve accessibility to medical interventions delivered into bodily fluids. Microfluidic lab-on-chips could stimulate immune cells for immunotherapy [3], which is an emerging treatment for cancer tumors
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