Researchers have developed a 3D printing technique to fabricate microfluidic devices for biomedical applications at a microscale not previously possible.
Microfluidic devices are compact testing tools made up of tiny channels carved on a chip, which allow biomedical researchers to test the properties of liquids, particles and cells at a microscale. They are crucial to drug development, diagnostic testing and medical research in areas such as cancer, diabetes and now COVID-19. However, the production of these devices is very labor intensive, with minute channels and wells that often need to be manually etched or molded into a transparent resin chip for testing. While 3D printing has offered many advantages for biomedical device manufacturing, its techniques were previously not sensitive enough to build layers with the minute detail required for microfluidic devices. Until now. Researchers at the USC Viterbi School of Engineering have now developed a highly specialized 3D printing technique that allows microfluidic channels to be fabricated on chips at a precise microscale not previously achieved. The research, led by Daniel J. Epstein Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering Ph.D. graduate Yang Xu and Professor of Aerospace and Mechanical Engineering and Industrial and Systems Engineering Yong Chen, in collaboration with Professor of Chemical Engineering and Materials Science Noah Malmstadt and Professor Huachao Mao at Purdue University, was published in Nature Communications. The research team used a type of 3D printing technology known as vat photopolymerization, which harnesses light to control the conversion of liquid resin material into its solid end state. "After light projection, we can basically decide where to build the parts (of the chip), and because we use light, the resolution can be rather high within a layer. However, the resolution is much worse between layers, which is a critical challenge in the building of microscale channels," Chen said. "This is the first time…