Abstract

Resolving the Pre-Analytical Gap: Blood Handling and Processing in Microfluidic Format

Maiwenn Kersaudy-Kerhoas, Assistant Professor, Heriot Watt University

Pre-analytics, or the manipulation and transformation of raw samples prior to their analysis, remains an important challenge for point-of-care devices. Demonstrating new sensing modalities on raw, rather than contrived samples, is sometimes considered as the ‘last frontier’. If done improperly, the pre-analytical phase can impact the quality of the sample analysis, and lead to diagnostic errors. This presentation will detail the design, production and use of simple, robust and modular devices for venous and capillary blood handling (covering blood transportation and metering, blood lysis, plasma separation and cell-free nucleic extraction) in microfluidic format. Our typical starting sample volume range spans from a few microliters to several milliliters and our devices have applications in point-of-care liquid biopsy workflows, from prenatal testing, drug-induced liver injury, and infectious disease diagnostic.