Development for an origami fluidic disc for cell pairing and a spiral chip flow for size-based separation

Abstract

The potential of laminated sheets as a novel material for creating lab-on-a-chip (LoC) and centrifugal lab-on-a-disk (LoD) devices allows us to explore a variety of biomedical applica-tions for cell manipulation. Despite their advantages, conventional setups have limitations due to their complex systems and expensive manufacturing methods. This thesis proposes an innovative solution by exploring the de-sign and fabrication of a centrifugal and stationary microfluidic platform that combines the advantages of origami and traditional designs and fabrication techniques. The approach presented in this work leverages the unique properties of origami to create an accessible and low-cost device for prove of concept studies for cell interaction techniques. The presented Origami Fluidic Disc (OFD) fabrication methodology includes cutting readily available materials by a plotter machine, layer folding techniques, followed by their thermal binding. One of the design of the OFDs is a centrifugal microfluidic platform which aims to optimize cell-to-cell interactions, enabling high yield cell pairing for the manipulation of wide range cell populations. In this regard, a 65mm based spinning microfluidic disc with a 40mm circular chamber operating at an optimized spin of 1020rpm enables the formation of a single-cell pairing ring formations consisted of 12,500 10-micron viable cells aligned. This thesis does not stop at demonstration of cell-engineering and the experimental setup for cell pairing. It also explores the integration of a stationary spiral microfluidic chip that contain specially designed 3D micro-grooves to efficiently facilitate particle size-based sepa-ration. The spiral chips involve the fabrication of a 75mm base with and internal channel of four and five spirals, each containing an average of 5 3D-grooves per spiral channel enabling the size-based separation of green and red fluorescent polystyrene beads of 5 and 1 microns of radius, respectively. In general, the presented approaches could potentially expand the accessibility of cell manipulation techniques and reduce rapid prototyping time and costs, by applying high-throughput cell pairing and efficient particle separation within low-cost microflu-idic platform fabrication.