Universal Interface Devised for Microfluidics

Biomedical engineers have developed a plug-in interface for the microfluidic chips that will form the basis of the next generation of compact medical devices. They envision that the "fit to flow” interface will become as omnipresent as the universal serial bus (USB) interface for computer peripherals.

Investigators from the University of California, Davis (UC Davis; USA) filed a provisional patent on the invention November 1, 2010. An article describing the devices was published online November 25, 2010 by the journal Lab on a Chip. "We think there is a huge need for an interface to bridge microfluidics to electronic devices,” said Dr. Tingrui Pan, assistant professor of biomedical engineering at UC Davis. Dr. Pan and graduate student Arnold Chen invented the chip and coauthored the paper.

Microfluidic devices use channels as small as a few micrometers across, cut into a plastic membrane, to perform biologic or chemical tests on a miniature scale. They could be utilized, for example, in compact devices used for medical diagnosis, food safety, or environmental monitoring. Cell phones with increasingly advanced cameras could be transformed into microscopes that could read such tests in the field.

However, it is difficult to connect these chips to electronic devices that can read the results of a test and store, display, or transmit it. Dr. Pan believes that the fit-to-flow connectors can be incorporated with a standard peripheral component interconnect (PCI) device typically used in consumer electronics, while an embedded micropump will provide on-demand, self-propelled microfluidic operations. With this standard connection format, chips that carry out different tests could be plugged into the same device--such as a cell phone, personal digital assistant (PDA) or laptop computer--to read the results.

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University of California, Davis