Abstract

Upscaling of Microfluidic Biosensors Manufacturing by Imprinting, Printing and Lamination Processes on Polymer Foils

Anja Haase, Senior Scientist, JOANNEUM RESEARCH Forschungsgesellschaft mbH

Recently developed microfluidic biosensors promise to surpass the performance of classic lateral flow immunoassays (LFIA). Next generations of biosensors could contribute to the solution of the current Covid-19 crisis with rapid antigen tests, also detecting patients with lower viral load (pre-symptomatic or asymptomatic carriers). Nevertheless - sensing elements of LFIA devices are manufactured highly parallel on rolls of cellulose paper - and contrarily, sensing components of most microfluidic devices run through process steps as single chips (injection molding) or wafers with maximum dozens of chips (wafer processing). This limits their potential for upscaling to the demanded millions of chips. As a potential solution, we present the implementation of microfluidic biosensors on polymer foils together with a platform for upscaling by manufacturing on foils from rolls. Patterning of microfluidic channels is done by roll-to-roll (R2R) imprinting, biomolecules (nucleic acids; aptamers; proteins) are printed by R2R microarray-spotting, chips are closed by R2R lamination processes. This manufacturing approach with high degree of process parallelisation (e.g. 50 chips per imprinting tool, throughput of 4500 chip components per hour) is suitable for the test quantities needed for mass screening in case of a pandemic outbreak. The technology is evaluated with the versatile diagnostic platform GENSPEED® (suitable for nucleic acid as well as protein-based assays). In its standard configuration, this platform works with chips from injection molding. In this study, a DNA based rapid test for antibiotics resistant bacteria was transferred to fully foil based chips from the R2R based manufacturing approach and was characterized in the same detection platform. A comparative study demonstrating the successful technology transfer will be presented.