Microfluidic Biochips and Plastic-Antibody Biosensors for Point-of-Care Diagnostics

Microfluidic biochips have been studied since the 1990s. The research area continues to have an increase important role in biological fundamental research and medical diagnostics. In future, microfuidic biochips will continue to play a critical role in genomics, proteomics, and cellulomics, as evidenced by the increased demand for biochips and tissue chips capable of handling personal medicine, toxicity analysis, and point-of-care diagnostics. Microfluidic biochips are becoming inexpensive, multifunctional, reliable, sample/reagent-saving, and process-parallel. Increasing miniaturization of biochips has led to the realization of micro total analysis systems and lab-on-a-chip systems. Traditional biochemical instruments require large amount of fluidic samples, large space occupation, complex procedures and long time for operation, and professional operators. In these years, biomedical microinstrumentation is applying MEMS and microfluidic technologies with biosensors and bioelectronics to speed up the detection and improve the accuracy instead of traditional instruments. However, most of biochips or lab chips are using syringe pumps or off-chip gas tanks with pressure regulators to handle fluidic samples. It will cause the loss of the fluidic samples, contaminations, and difficulties in minimization and portability. It has large demands on developing on-chip pressure or vacuum sources for disposable lab-on-chip systems for multiple steps or multiple samples suction to precisely deliver tiny fluidic samples into the microchannels for biosensing.