Cheap, Smart, and Disposable Polymer Lab-on-a-Chips for Clinical Diagnostics using Microfluidics and BioMEMS Technologies

摘要

Diseases, including toxicity, can be diagnosed by performing various biochemical analyses and by observation of symptoms. The early, rapid, and sensitive detection of the disease state is a vital goal for clinical diagnostics. The biochemical changes in the patient's blood can signal organ damage or dysfunction prior to observable microscopic cellular damages or other symptoms. So, there have been large demands for the development of a point-of-care testing diagnostic system with an inexpensive disposable lab-on-a-chip platform. Specifically, the development of a point-of-care testing (POCT) system is desirable for the analysis of a number of different compounds including lactate, glucose, carbon dioxide, oxygen, and ion levels in the blood as well as for the detection of various infectious diseases and proteins. A wearable and wireless health monitoring system such as a wrist watch-type point-of-care testing system would be one of the most favorable personal health care systems in hospitals or for outpatients. Recently, the speaker and his research team have developed an innovative, fully integrated, cheap, disposable "smart" plastic lab-on-a-chip for the dual applications of a fully stand-alone diagnostic kit and a wrist watch-type point-of-care system. The speaker will present an easy-to-handle and inexpensive disposable lab-on-a-chip for clinical diagnostics, including bioelectronics and miniature power sources required for the hand-held analyzer. The disposable smart plastic lab-on-a-chip has sampling/identifying capabilities for the fast and reliable measurements of metabolic parameters or diagnostics of specific biomarkers from a human body with minimum invasion. In addition, other potential applications of the disposable lab-on-a-chip to genomics, proteomics, environment monitoring, and detection of BW agents are discussed. In this presentation, an overview of the speaker's recent research achievements for the smart and disposable plastic lab-on-a-chip for blood sampling and analysis will be presented, discussing the relevant microfluidics and BioMEMS issues to the design, fabrication, and characterization of microfluidic devices, biochemical sensors, disposable plastic lab-on-a-chips, and wrist watch type point-of-care testing systems.