Magnetic Microfluidic Platform for Biomedical Applications Using Magnetic Nanoparticles

Abstract

Microfluidic platforms are well-suited for biomedical analysis and usually consist of a set of units which guarantee the manipulation, detection and recognition of bioanalyte in a reliable and flexible manner. Additionally, the use of magnetic fields for perfoming the aforementioned tasks has been steadily gainining interest. This is due to the fact that magnetic fields can be well tuned and applied either externally or from a directly integrated solution in the diagnostic system. In combination with these applied magnetic fields, magnetic nanoparticles are used. In this paper, we present some of our most recent results in research towards a) microfluidic diagnostics using MR sensors and magnetic particles and b) single cell analysis using magnetic particles. We have successfully manipulated magnetically labeled bacteria and measured their response with integrated GMR sensors and we have also managed to separate magnetically labeled jurkat cells for single cell analysis.