Abstract

The commercial success of Lab-on-a-chip (LoC) based diagnostic systems for point of care testing is determined by the manufacturing costs of consumables and instrument and the resulting price per LoC test. Clinical users always have to justify their spendings on diagnostic assays to the controlling department of their institutions. For this reason the price per LoC test always competes with the price offered by the central laboratory. In order to develop commercially successful assays, strategies for economical production of the consumables have to be implemented in the early stages of industrial LoC-projects. 

To enable cost efficiency, guidelines and strategies related to the design, production, and assembly of microfluidic cartridges will be presented. Examples covering methods for simplifying sample processing, cartridge production, valve integration, bonding, dried reagent implementation will be given and discussed with respect to cost efficiency under mass-manufacturing conditions. Still, cost issues are the main hindrance for successful market introduction of microfluidic based diagnostics assays to the emerging market of point of care testing.