A Snapshot of Microfluidics in Point‐of‐Care Diagnostics: Multifaceted Integrity with Materials and Sensors

Abstract

devices, where engineering, biochemistry, molecular biology, and biomedical technologies are integrated seamlessly with each other. POC devices have great advantages due to their portability, size, accuracy, and low volume of samples. These advantages are fundamentally changing the workflow of health care systems by shortening the turnaround time, accelerating the clinical decisionmaking with early treatment possibilities, and enabling to test individuals at resource-scarce settings, including but not limited to disaster areas, remote settings, or physician office with the limited laboratory access. Ultimately, this crucial direction makes health delivery closer to the patient rather than the provider. [4] In addition, even if the patient is not living in the countryside, the utilization of POC devices at hospitals has exhibited a remarkable reduction in the duration of hospital stay due to the elimination of time-consuming, centralized laboratory testing. [5,6] Since the size and portability are great advantages of POC devices, storage, proper usage, and quality control of tests are still unmet challenges. For instance, external factors, e.g., light, humidity, and temperature, hinder the performance of these tests potentially, and thereby, they need to be controlled comprehensively through regular calibrations, technical service, and maintenance performed by trained and experienced personnel, which potentially increase their cost and complexity, as well as limit their utility at the resourceconstrained settings. [7,8] Microfluidics, on the other hand, denotes a unique opportunity by controlling and manipulating the low volume of liquids (10 -9 to 10 -18 L) precisely; handling samples easily; offering inexpensive and large-scale production with the desired parameters; modulating surface properties and integrating multiple control units; and presenting versatile integrity with different sensing modalities. All these features highlight the potential of microfluidics as a full or integrative unit of POC diagnostic devices. From the production perspective, there are many microfabrication methods, such as replica molding, nanoimprint lithography, SU-8 photoresist, rapid prototyping, microinjection molding, and plasma processing. [9,10] In these platforms, liquids can be controlled in microscale membranes, valves, chambers, reservoirs by mixing or reacting them with each other. Moreover, all these kinds of fashions manipulating the low volume of liquids are creating great opportunities for POC applications, where integration, miniaturization, computerization Over four decades, point-of-care (POC) technologies and their pivotal applications in the biomedical arena have increased irrepressibly and allowed to realize the potential of portable and accurate diagnostic strategies. Today, in the light of these advances, POC systems dominate the medical inventions and bring the diagnostics to the bedside settings, potentially minimizing the workload in the centralized laboratories, as well as remarkably reducing the associated...

Trends in Nanophotonics‐Enabled Optofluidic Biosensors

“…Compared to traditional ELISA approaches, such integrated platforms can make the detection of local surface‐binding events much more time‐efficient and reliable. [ 10,197,198 ] Recently, this concept has been extended toward modular microfluidic devices through the realization of a standardized plug‐and‐play fluidic circuit board (FCB) for operating multiple microfluidic building blocks (MFBBs). [ 197 ] A single FCB can parallelize up to three MFBBs of the same design or operate MFBBs with entirely different architectures, whereby the operation of MFBBs through the FCB is fully automated and does not require additional external footprint.…”

Smart Material‐Integrated Systems for Isolation and Profiling of Rare Cancer Cells and Emboli

“…Enrichment reliant on magnetic affinity is another method, in which both immunomagnetic assays and microfluidics are employed to distinguish rare cells and cellular entities. [119][120][121][122] As previously mentioned, the CellSearch platform is the first validated CTCs enrichment assay using magnetic fields. [27,99] On the other hand, immunomagnetic cell separation and density gradient are some of the first recorded studies of CTM isolation from whole human blood.…”

Current and emerging trends in polymeric 3D printed microfluidic devices

“…Microfluidic chips are assembled with a series of sub-millimeter channels, specifically designed to achieve the desired features, e.g., mixing, pumping, or sorting the liquid passing through them [3,[11][12][13]. Connecting such microfluidics with a few electronic elements, the devices (known as lab-on-a-chip) might be used in different biochemical applications for controlling/monitoring the behavior of specific analytical solutions, useful for rapid DNA sequencing, electrophoretic separation, wearable sensors, organ-on-chip development and disease diagnosis in point-of-care settings with a high level of precision [14][15][16][17]. Currently, there are different methods to produce microfluidic devices, e.g., micromachining, softlithography, (hot)-embossing, injection molding, and laser ablation, among the principals [18][19][20].…”