Laboratory unit operations on centrifugal lab-on-a-disc cartridges using dissolvable-film enabled flow control

摘要

The suitability of the centrifugal “lab-on-a-disc” (LoaD) platform for point-of-use / point-of-care deployment, where ruggedness, portability, rapid turn-around times and ease-of-use are key, has resulted in increased interest from the academic community over the last decade. Recently, a new, so-called event-triggered valving paradigm was introduced which circumvented a number of the limitations of commonly used, rotationally actuated valves and complex instrument-controlled valving. In the dissolvable-film based event-triggered approach, it is the liquid movement about a disc which actuates a valve; thus enabling the concatenating of a number of liquid handling operations into an automated cascade. Functioning broadly independent of spin rate, the number of discrete valving operations is only limited by the available disc real-estate. In this work we present this valving paradigm to control a network of discrete Laboratory Unit Operations (LUOs) which, with experienced design, can be integrated together to implement complex fluidic assays. We describe how these valves can be configured, using Boolean-like network relationships, to implement LUOs such as sequential washing steps. We also describe how these valves can be configured to enable metering, mixing and selective routing of liquid flows. Finally, we describe how these valves can be configured to provide accurate temporal control of LUOs; thus providing an entire suite of process control technology which can be used to enable many bio-assays.