That is, they can adjust how much droplets flatten down into pancakes or remain spherical while making it easier or harder for them to slide down an incline. The new gravity-driven approach relies on a set of nine commercially available surface coatings that can tweak the wettability and slipperiness at any given point on the device. "This approach is much simpler and also allows very complex fluid paths to be deigned and operated, which is not easy or cheap to do with microfluidics." "Most microfluidic devices need more than just capillary forces to operate," Chilkoti said. Each approach offers uniquely useful abilities as well as drawbacks. This is the first demonstration that only uses gravity. Others use the physics of liquids within microchannels (microfluidics) that create a sort of suction effect. More expensive examples use tiny electrical pumps to drive these reactions. Their goal is to improve health care for the billions of people living in low-resource settings far from traditional hospitals and trained clinicians.Īll of these tests have the same basic requirements they must move, mix and measure small droplets containing biological samples and the active ingredients that make measuring specific biomarkers possible. Many demonstrations and commercial devices seek to make diagnoses or measure important biomarkers using only a few drops of liquid with as little power and expertise required as possible. There is no shortage of need for simple, easy-to-use, point-of-care devices. Kaganov Distinguished Professor of Biomedical Engineering at Duke, appears online July 11 in the journal Device. The study conducted in the laboratory of Ashutosh Chilkoti, the Alan L. "You could theoretically even just use a handsaw and cut the channels needed for the test into a piece of wood." "The elegance in this approach is all in its simplicity - you can use whatever tools you happen to have to make it work," said Hamed Vahabi, a former postdoctoral researcher at Duke, who is now a lead analysis engineer at GE Hitachi.
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