Abstract

3D-Printing of Microfluidic Devices in Biocompatible Polymers

Albert Folch, Professor of Bioengineering, University of Washington

The Folch lab's mission is to make microfluidic devices as easy to use as smartphones and make them easily avalable to clinicians in order to enable novel cancer diagnostics and therapies. However, biologists and clinicians typically do not have access to microfluidic technology because they do not have the engineering expertise or equipment required to fabricate and/or operate microfluidic devices. At present, microfluidic technology is universally based on the replica-molding and bonding of elastomers (such as poly(dimethyl siloxane) (PDMS)) or thermoplastics (such as poly(methyl methacrylate) (PMMA) or poly-styrene (PS)). Furthermore, the present commercialization path for microfluidic devices is usually restricted to high-volume applications in order to recover the large investment needed to develop the plastic molding processes. We are developing stereolithographic 3D-printing methods for the fabrication of microfluidic devices in order to make microfluidic technology readily available via the web to biomedical scientists. Until now, most available SL resins did not have all the favorable physicochemical properties of the above-named plastics (e.g., biocompatibility, transparency, elasticity, and gas permeability), so the performance of SL-printed devices was still inferior to that of equivalent PDMS devices. We have developed microfluidic devices by SL in two resins – low-MW PEG-DA and a 3D-printable form of PDMS – that have excellent transparency, cytocompatibility, and flexibility.