Abstract
Previous diagnosing methods based on agglutination have a limitation in view of emergency and point-of-care diagnoses due to the requirement of large scale equipments and much agglutination time. In this paper, we propose a low cost microfluidic lab-on-a-chip for more efficient detection of agglutination. In the present lab-on-a-chip, two inlet microwells, flow guiding microchannels, chaotic micromixer and reaction microwell are fully integrated. Mold inserts for the lab-on-a-chip were manufactured by UV photolithography and nickel electroplating process. The complete lab-on-a-chip was realized by the microinjection molding of cyclic olefin copolymer and the subsequent thermal bonding. The improved serpentine laminating micromixer, developed by our group, integrated in the lab-on-a-chip showed the high-level of chaotic mixing, thereby enabling us to get a reliable mixing of sample and reagent. The performance of the fabricated lab-on-a-chip was demonstrated by agglutination experiments with simulated bloods of 10 μl and simulated sera of 10 μl. The results of agglutination inside the reaction microwell were clearly read by means of the level of light transmission. The present microfluidic lab-on-a-chip could be widely applied to various clinical diagnostics based on agglutination tests.
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Acknowledgment
The authors would like to thank the Korean Ministry of Commerce, Industry and Energy for financial support via the Development of Next-Generation New Technology Program (Development of Intelligent Robot Technologies for Laboratory Medicine by Applying Biotechnology) (10024719), and the author, DSK was partially supported by the Chung-Ang University Excellent Researcher Grant in 2008.
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Choi, S.H., Kim, D.S. & Kwon, T.H. Microinjection molded disposable microfluidic lab-on-a-chip for efficient detection of agglutination. Microsyst Technol 15, 309–316 (2009). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00542-008-0689-x
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00542-008-0689-x