Microfluidic system for high-throughput cell-based assay

Abstract

Analysis systems for cell-based assay have been significant importance in biology, neuroscience and medicine. Recently with great progress in biotechnology, genetics, and bioengineering, more rapid and automated analytical systems are required. In this thesis, the integrated microfluidic system for high-throughput cell-based assay has been proposed and implemented using microfabrication technology. The proposed microfluidic system is composed of cell reaction chamber, microfluidic control unit, detection unit, and electrical process/control unit. This dissertation focuses on the cell reaction chamber and microfluidic control unit with micropump, liquid metering and injection. For a fundamental microfluidic control unit, micropump driven by continuous electro-wetting has been developed for low power consumption and low voltage operation. All parts of the micropump, including check valves, silicone rubber membranes and a CEW actuator, have been fabricated using MEMS-based technologies, and the actuation of the micropump has been successfully demonstrated. The operation voltage of the fabricated micropump was below 2.3 V and the power consumption was lower than 170㎼. The maximum flow rate was measured to be about 70㎕/min at a frequency of 25 Hz with an applied voltage of 2.3 V, and a maximum pump pressure of about 800 Pa was obtained. Using the surface modification and channel dimension modulation method, we have proposed programmable liquid metering scheme and presented the effectiveness using computational simulation. Also the structure for sample injection without air introduction into the reaction chamber has been proposed and experimentally proved. In this thesis, two types of cell reaction chamber have been proposed and fabricated. One is single-cell analysis device performing single-cell capturing and specific drug injection into the captured single-cell using the mentioned liquid injection structure. The device is designed, so that single-cell is autonomo...