Microfluidics

We want to understand how microscopic swimmers navigate in complicated flow fields where the ambient fluid flow speed is much greater than their swimming speed. Up to now, the motility of these organisms, ranging from bacteria to small planktonic animals, has been studied in still water. While this is an important first step, it is essential to connect the motion in still fluid to the locomotion of organisms in their more complicated natural environments. In flowing water, these organisms are carried by the flow around them and can make only minor adjustments to their trajectory by...

This project aims for developing a new 'human-powered' microfluidic system for point-of-care diagnostics applications. Chip- based microfluidics offers a promising platform for biological studies; however, bulky and expensive equipments such as syringe pumps limit the application. To minimize the total setup, we propose an alternative 'human-powered' fluid pumping device. Pressure generated by human finger works as a major power source to pump fluids into microfluidic devices without any electricity. As we use common softlithography fabrication process, our system can be easily...

A new era of drug discovery and development is being marched with the concept of “personalized medicine”. “Organ-on-a-chips or OCs” are one of the movements, which are to recapitulate 3-dimensional organ models in microfluidic culture platforms. By combining iPSC-derived human organ cells, individuals’ physiological response can be investigated so that the needs of animal model, inadequately representing human physiology, will be vanished in drug development in a near future. Herein,we are challenging the development of liver-, heart-, and brain-on-a-chip for the organs most...

It is desirable for medical diagnostic assays to have portable and low cost pumping schemes. Although capillary loading is the most common example, it cannot load dead-end channels, often have fibres that obstruct optics, and have surface treatment or geometrical constraints. On the other hand, conventional degas pumping lacks flow control, speed, and reliability. Here we report a new portable pumping system that does not require any peripheral equipment or external power sources/controls. Compared with conventional degas pumping, it has ~8 times less standard deviation in speed, is...