Microfluidic Platforms for Miniaturization, Integration and Automation of Biochemical Assays

Inhalt:
In this contribution we discuss two microfluidic platforms that enable the miniaturization, integration and automation of biochemical assays. The first platform, known as “capillary test stripes” or also as “lateral flow assays”, can be regarded as the gold-standard of today’s point-of-care diagnostics. The second platform, “centrifugal microfluidics”, is under development in our lab. It allows enhancing the accuracy of assays and enables easy parallelisation. Both platforms allow to perform a set of microfluidic functions – defined as microfluidic unit operations – which can be easily combined within a well defined and consistent fabrication technology. This way application specific biochemical assays can be implemented in a flexible and cost-efficient way.