Abstract

Precise, Intelligent, Mobile and Secure POC Diagnostics: How Can Tech Help?

Emmanuel Delamarche, Manager, Precision Diagnostics, IBM Research GmbH

Diagnostics are ubiquitous in healthcare because they support prevention, diagnosis and treatment of diseases. Specifically, point-of-care diagnostics are particularly attractive for identifying diseases near patients, quickly, and in many settings and scenarios. One of our contribution to the field of microfluidics is the development of capillary-driven microfluidic chips for highly miniaturized immunoassays. In this presentation, I will review how to program capillary flow and encode specific functions to form microfluidic elements that can easily be assembled into self-powered devices for immunoassays, reaching unprecedented levels of precision for manipulating samples and reagents. This technology can also be augmented using peripherals and smartphones for flow control and monitoring with sub-nanoliter precision. Finally, counterfeiting of point-of-care diagnostics is an issue, with sometimes dramatic consequences. Using capillary phenomena, we devised a method for producing in chips a complex signal with a “time domain” for authentication of devices. All together, capillary-driven elements can bring extremely high control for manipulating sub-microliter volumes of samples and picogram quantities of reagents and may therefore extend the performances of microfluidic devices for point-of-care diagnostics to a next level of precision.