Organ-on-chip (OoC) is a remarkable example of the convergence of biology and microengineering. OoC has a great potential to revolutionize the current existing in-vitro approach to drug discovery and development, resulting in a reduction in the need for animal experiments and accelerating the research and development process for future precision and personalised medicine. However, the complexity of the system is a hurdle in the transfer of the OoC system from laboratory to large-scale manufacturing and commercial application. The miniaturisation and integration of sensing and actuation components is an important aspect to be addressed to ensure the manufacturability of the system. Moreover, a closed-loop control system is required to create a smart OoC system that can operate dynamically to process the information and make decisions in a predictive or adaptive manner.
The objective of this proposed research project is to develop a smart OoC system by utilising multimode Lamb waves for sensing, actuation, and control, integrated within a microfluidic system. Furthermore, for OoC with a multi-chamber microfluidic system, a porous membrane is required for channel separation and communication. At the end of the project, we have successfully developed a miniaturised plate acoustic wave (PAW)-based biosensor that offers simple and direct integration with a microfluidic channel. In addition to the scaling down in term of geometry, the miniaturisation of the sensor increases the operating frequency of the sensor which also increase the theoretical sensitivity of the sensor. Furthermore, we have designed and fabricated a silicon-based porous membrane which offers flexibility in designing the membrane geometry, in terms of thickness, porous size and porosity. The design of the sensor and the membrane as well as the choice of material allow us to fabricate a PDMS-free organ-on-chip platform, which will be suitable for some applications such as drug-organ interaction, Furthermore, the fabrication process flow is based on standard semiconductor clean room fabrication process which will allow direct integration with CMOS-based integration circuit and high volume manufacturing. Thus the result of this project will contribute to the standardisation of the OoC platform for large-scale manufacturing to achieve its potential for future personalised medicine applications.
