论文部分内容阅读
New methods are needed to achieve low-cost,yet highly functional microfluidic devices,suitable for single-use point-of-care-testing (POCT) applications.Traditional fabrication methods,such as glass etching,hot-embossing and injection molding,do not scale well for the volumes and needs of the healthcare industry.Glass and silicon based devices have high fabrication costs and are difficult to integrate with the necessary biomolecular reagents due to high temperature processing.Injection molding can achieve low cost devices but only for high volumes which limits such devices to a smaller range of applications.Even then,reagent integration and bonding still present significant challenges.Inkjet printing presents exciting possibilities to achieve low-cost,highly functional microfluidic devices which can meet the needs of a wide range of diagnostic healthcare applications.Structural (e.g.fluidic) elements,biomolecular reagents,and electronic sensing elements may all be fabricated using the same inkjet printing methodologies onto a wide range of low-cost,substrates.These can simply be laminated to achieve complex,highly functional microfluidic devices [1].However,much work is still required to develop and optimize the fabrication processes required as little work has been reported in this area compared with traditional methods.In this talk,I present an overview of the current state-of-the-art in this area and present some new methods and approaches for inkjet printing of various functional materials for the fabrication of microfluidic components and devices [2].We use a Dimatix DMP-3000 material printer to demonstrate high resolution printing of electronic and structural components suitable for producing high quality microfluidic devices at significantly reduced costs.In particular,we present all printed organic electronic field effect transistors using conjugated polymers and the printing of electronic and hydrophobic materials onto paper substrates [3-4].We believe that such methods will form a useful basis for the further development of the next generation of POCT diagnostic devices.