Point-of-Care, Biosensors and Mobile Diagnostics Europe 2022 Agenda

Morning Coffee, Tea and Networking in the Exhibit Hall

A Microfluidic Handheld Platform - Flexible Use With and Without Instrument
Claudia Gärtner, CEO, microfluidic ChipShop GmbH

Microfluidic Concepts For Bringing More Precision to Point-of-Care Diagnostics
Emmanuel Delamarche, Senior Manager, Spiden AG, Switzerland

Diagnostics are ubiquitous in healthcare because they support prevention, diagnosis and treatment of diseases. Specifically, point-of-care (POC) diagnostics are particularly attractive for identifying diseases near patients, quickly, and in many settings and scenarios. In the context of infectious diseases, there is clearly an urgent need for bringing POC diagnostics to a next level in terms of speed and precision. In this presentation, I will detail some of the former work I did, while at IBM, on new concepts for encoding flow at the microscale using capillary phenomena, implementing highly miniaturized assays, monitoring flow, and making programmable capillary circuits. Specifically, I will provide an update on “self-coalescence modules” and on how these microfluidic elements can be used to implement fast biochemical reactions involving nanoliter volumes and parallel reactions in just a few square millimeters.

Mid-Morning Coffee and Tea Break and Networking in the Exhibit Hall

Point-of-Care Testing of Small Analytes Using Paper-based Analytical Devices
Jean-Manuel Segura, Professor, University of Applied Sciences and Arts Western Switzerland Valais, Switzerland

Paper offers many advantages as a material to produce point-of-care (POC) diagnostic tests: Paper-based analytical devices (PAD) are cheap, amenable for mass manufacturing, easy to dispose after use and do not require external actuation. Many important biomarkers tested using PADs are small molecules. While some analytes such as glucose can be analyzed using enzymatic assays, most are quantified using competitive immunoassays, which require well-defined concentrations of the reagents (antibodies and tracers). This is not easy to achieve in a POC format, might result in assay variability and renders assay design more complex.  During this talk, I will present two examples how competitive immunoassays can be implemented in paper-based analytical devices for POC applications.  In a first example, I will describe the development of a lateral flow assay for salivary cortisol, a biomarker of chronic stress. The low concentration and the stringent requirements on assay precision make the development of such a test challenging. A detailed understanding of the underlying immunoassay mechanism enabled a considerable improvement of the performance.  In a second example, I will discuss the development of a vertical flow assay for the antibiotics tobramycin, which requires therapeutic drug monitoring to ensure efficacy while avoiding oto- and nephrotoxicity. A homogeneous competitive immunoassay based on fluorescence polarization was implemented inside paper microzones hosting both plasma extraction and detection.

Optical Molecular Sensing and Imaging of Cancer
Mark Bradley, Professor of Therapeutic Innovation, Precision Healthcare University Research Institute, Queen Mary University of London, United Kingdom

In my talk I will describe a number of technologies that have come out of the Proteus project that has, as its focus, the use of light (of a variety of flavors) to sense and image disease. This includes:
(i). The use of optical fibers for measuring pH around tumors;
(ii). The application of chemical probes that can paint disease (bacterial infection and cancer will be illustrated);
(iii). The use of novel CMOS SPAD detectors that allows for rapid full spectral fluorescent lifetime imaging to be used in the analysis of cancerous tissues (targeting cancer margin detection).

Networking Lunch in the Exhibit Hall with Exhibitors and Conference Sponsors + Poster Viewing

Poster Prizes Announced - Poster Prizes Sponsored by the Royal Society of Chemistry UK

Elasto-Magnetic Pumps for Point-of-Care Diagnostics
Jacob Binsley, Researcher, University of Exeter, United Kingdom

We have developed a possible novel pumping solution and have fabricated and tested an experimental, elasto-magnetic micropump inspired by Purcell’s 3-link swimmer. This design, consisting of 3 elasticated links made from PDMS, is coupled to an external magnetic driving field via the inclusion of a small Neodymium Iron Boron magnet. When provided with a weak, uniaxial oscillating driving field with flux density of 10s of gauss and frequency in the range of 10s of Hz, the device produces tuneable and reversible fluid flow. During our most recent investigations, we modelled this system numerically using COMSOL Multiphysics to not only verify our experiments, but to explore the device more deeply and gain an understanding of how this system may be optimised. These new numerical results will be the main subject of this talk, and offer valuable and very visual insight into bio-inspired pumping mechanisms for lab-on-a-chip POC devices.

An Opto-Microfluidic Lab-on-a-Chip in Lithium Niobate for Protein Concentration Analysis
Leonardo Zanini, Research Scientist, University of Padova, Italy

This presentation shows an opto-microfluidic lab-on-a-chip applied to protein concentration investigation. By integrating droplet microfluidics with miniaturized waveguides, this device sets a new frontier in biological sample processing, merging miniaturization and sample saving with real-time content analysis.

Towards Microfluidic Design Automation: System Modelling of Complete Microfluidic Networks
Julia Boeke, Researcher, Leibniz Institute of Photonic Technology, Germany

Microfluidic design automation enables the model-based design of complete and complex lab-on-a-chip systems. We proposed a microfluidic network solver utilizing Kirchhoff laws to model the entire microfluidic network in less than 200 ms for microfluidic design automation.

The Next Evolution in Microfluidic 3D Printing
Hemdeep Patel, President, Co-Founder, CADworks3D

Hydrodynamically Controlled Cross-Slot Microfluidic Trap for High Strain Rate Applications
Aravind George, PhD Student, The University of Melbourne, Australia

An automated hydrodynamic cross-slot microfluidic trap capable of generating high strain rates, thus, an improvised platform to apply long-term, highly accurate and controllable spatially uniform strain rates to study the effect of straining flow at single cell level.

Microscopy Platform To Unravel Sperm Propulsion
Farzan Akbaridoust, Research Fellow, University of Melbourne, Australia

A unique microscopy technique to discover the hydrodynamic mechanism of sperm propulsion by unravelling the formation of locomotion-generated vortical flow structures.

Chip-Sized Cell Gene Modification System For Integration Into Modular Microfluidics
Hashim Alhmoud, Marie-Curie Actions Post-Doctoral Fellow, Bilkent University, Turkey

The design of a modular lab-on-a-chip component with a small footprint for intracellular cargo delivery is presented. Using the microfluidics-compatible mechanism, the membranes of cells interacting with the mechanism are temporarily permeabilized to allow extracellular cargo to enter the cytosol.

Single Cell and Microparticle Sensing with Microwave Sensor
Uzay Tefek, Graduate Student, Bilkent University, Turkey

Real-time, rapid and accurate analysis of cells and microparticles is an important feature in biological and environmental sensing applications. In this study, we investigated whether the difference in dielectric properties of particles and cells in a solution passing through microfluidic could be detected and characterized by using a microwave sensor. With this system, we were able to use the dielectric signature of the analytes to distinguish different analyte particles (mammalian cells, different microplastics) from each other. To probe the internal structure of materials and avoid Debye screening, we worked at the microwave band using resonant sensors probed by a custom circuitry. Different entities, such as MDA-231 cells, and microplastic particles with different compositions and sizes were passed through the microchannel, and the signals they induced on the microwave sensors were matched with their optical images. By plotting the optical size vs. the microwave signals, it was observed that data for each particle class, clustered at a unique position in the sensing space, providing both size and material classification capability. The approach presented here opens up a path for label-free material classification and size detection in microfluidic systems.

Close of Programming on Day 2 of the Conference