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Microfluidics deal with the flow of liquids inside micrometer-sized channels.⁶ While the intended design for the microfluidic channels within the perfusion bioreactor are not within the range of micrometer-diameters, the design of current microfluidic chips inspired the cell culture chamber of the bioreactor.
Current microfluidic chips create micro-channels etched or molded into a material such as glass, silicon or PDMS. PDMS, or PolyDimethylSiloxane, has unique properties of flexibility and adhesion to other surfaces through the use of plasma bonding. This process allows the PDMS to fuse into the other material and create necessary leak-proof sealing. Microfluidic devices have many uses, such as flow cytometry, immunoassays, cardiovascular circulation, and capillary electrophoresis.
Microfluidic Example
Microfluidic Example
The image on the left is a microfluidic device for isolating and detecting circulating breast cancer exosomes from patients' blood samples. This unique device uses immunomagnetic separation and detection of the promising tumor biomarker called tumor-derived circulating exosomes in situ.
In this particular image, the microfluidic device uses 6 microwells to contain reagents, 6 microvalves for reagent delivery, a reaction chamber with a magnet to fix and detect the exosomes.
Microfluidic Scaling
One of the major disadvantages of the current bioreactor design is the high flow rate and use of material for one experiment, making a very inefficient design for an experiment that lasts longer than an hour. Microfluidic chips allow anywhere in the magnitude of picoliters to microliters per minute. Based on the previous scale, it is possible to decrease the flow rate up to 30-fold. With the use of pin connectors to connect larger tubes to the channels within the microfluidic device, the channels designed within the cell culture chamber for this bioreactor can reduce the flow rate to about 20 microliters per minute. This would also scale down the amount of cell culture used for each experiment, as this has the ability to use about 1.5 million cells for one chamber. While the insertion of the cells into the device will require a very specific protocol established after many trials, a microfluidic chip will be able to cut down costs of each material while still providing enough to collect amino acid concentration data for an experiment.
References
“What Is Microfluidics?” News-Medical.Net, 3 Jan. 2017, https://www.news-medical.net/life-sciences/What-is-Microfluidics.aspx.
“Microfluidics and Microfluidic Devices: a Review.” Elveflow, www.elveflow.com/microfluidic-tutorials/microfluidic-reviews-and-tutorials/microfluidics-and-microfluidic-device-a-review/.
Chen, Wenwen et al. “Microfluidic device for on-chip isolation and detection of circulating exosomes in blood of breast cancer patients.” Biomicrofluidics vol. 13,5 054113. 31 Oct. 2019, doi:10.1063/1.5110973
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