Next-generation biosensing technologies will need to tackle the grand challenges arising from the global demographic changes. Among the most crucial tasks to be addressed is the monitoring of food and environmental quality, as well as the medical diagnosis. Digital fluidics offers vast advantages in performing these tasks by relying on tiny containers encapsulating reacting biochemical species and allows massively parallelized assays and screening at high throughput using mainly optical detection approaches. We envision that adding not-optic-based detectors to the droplet-based fluidics will provide a source of new and complementary information, which can pave the way towards label-free and contactless monitoring the kinetics of chemical reactions without interrupting the flow. The use of non-optical methods is imperative to speed-up the process of the testing of novel drugs and monitoring of water quality.
Being supported by the ERC in the frame of the PoC project ANALYTICS, we brought the fundamental developments of the millifluidic resonance detector to the level of industry-ready prototypes. In the frame of the project, the device is optimized to meet generic industrial standards. At its present realization, the device, which is just a tiny portable box, is directly connected to a computer via a single USB cable, which provides the device with the necessary electrical power and allows the reading of the measured data. We put forth the innovative design of the device, which enables customers to replace millifluidic tubing in a straightforward and time efficient manner without the need to disassemble the device. With this prototype, we already established contacts to industry and academic partners regarding the use of our fluidic platform in their settings. Furthermore, we target further optimization of our measurement platform to fit the specific needs of these potential customers. This successful development from the fundamental to the prototype level in such a short time was possible only due to the dedicated financing in the spirit of the application-oriented ERC PoC project.
