Improved experimental time of ultra‐large bioassays using a parallelised microfluidic biochip architecture/scheduling

Abstract

Digital microfluidic is an emerging technology to reduce the cost and time of experiments and improve the flexibility, automate-ability and correctness of biochemical assays. In many of applications such as drug discovery and DNA profiling, a large number of bio-operations (e.g. the chemical operations used in biology applications) must be done. In these applications, parallelising the operations will be critical in accuracy and cost of the process and digital microfluidic biochips can be considered as a reasonable platform. In this study, a new microfluidic architecture and the corresponding CAD flow is introduced to parallelise the assays on this platform. The authors implemented the proposed architecture and evaluated it using the large real bioassays. The authors' simulations show that the degree-of-parallelism and speed of bioassays are increased more than 4× and the improvements will be better for larger assays. This contribution can open new horizons in drug testing, biology experiments and medical diagnosis operations that contain iterative, time-consuming and labour experiments.

Drug Discovery Acceleration Using Digital Microfluidic Biochip Architecture and Computer-aided-design Flow

“…This work uses and evaluates a new digital microfluidic platform, Programmable Bio-Cell Matrix (PBCM-), for accelerating the execution time of bioassays. Using Can flow algorithms, PBCM performs basic bio-operations in parallel [15]. PBCM is compared by FPPC by our proposed case studies, such as assays of aspirin, acetaminophen, and the BCA protein assay.…”